Text movie subtitles

Kate streams can carry Unicode text (that is, text that can represent pretty much any existing language/script). If several Kate streams are multiplexed along with a video, subtitles in various languages can be made for that movie.

An easy way to create such subtitles is to use ffmpeg2theora, which can create Kate streams from SubRip (.srt) format files, a simple but common text subtitles format. ffmpeg2theora 0.21 or later is needed.

At its simplest:

ffmpeg2theora -o video-with-subtitles.ogg --subtitles subtitles.srt \ video-without-subtitles.avi

Several languages may be created and tagged with their language code for easy selection in a media player:

ffmpeg2theora -o video-with-subtitles.ogg video-without-subtitles.avi \ --subtitles japanese-subtitles.srt --subtitles-language ja \ --subtitles welsh-subtitles.srt --subtitles-language cy \ --subtitles english-subtitles.srt --subtitles-language en_GB

Alternatively, kateenc (which comes with the libkate distribution) can create Kate streams from SubRip files as well. These can then be merged with a video with oggz-tools:

kateenc -t srt -c subtitles -l it -o subtitles.ogg italian-subtitles.srt oggz merge -o movie-with-subtitles.ogg movie-without-subtitles.ogg subtitles.ogg

HOWTO-DVD-subtitles

DVD subtitles are not text, but images. Thoggen, a DVD ripper program, can convert these subtitles to Kate streams (at the time of writing, Thoggen and GStreamer have not applied the necessary patches for this to be possible out of the box, so patching them will be required).

When configuring how to rip DVD tracks, any subtitles will be detected by Thoggen, and selecting them in the GUI will cause them to be saved as Kate tracks along with the movie.


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