Drive Thru Download Subtitles
Silvio Orbino
Right now I am feeling blah. I have a severe to profound hearing loss. I am sad about not being able to go to drive-in movies, because most drive-in movies do not have captions, and I cannot enjoy it without captions. I cannot take my hearing significant other out to the movies because I won't understand any of it. What is the point? A movie theater closed down in my town, another is offering closed captioning but of course cannot go inside. Now that we're in the middle of a pandemic, we need drive-in movie theaters more than ever, and of course I can't enjoy drive-in movies. The ADA does not apply to drive-in movie theaters. I sometimes am tired of privileged hearing people ;-)
I am aware that this can be achieved through the in-browser Google Drive interface, by manually right-clicking on each video to "Manage caption tracks" and then locating the subtitles file (format: .vtt) in my Google Drive. However, I noticed that when I update the subtitles file later, the video does not "refresh" its access to it, but instead continues to display an older version of the subtitles .vtt file.
Is there a way to add and/or update the subtitles track using the Google Drive API? For background, I use PyDrive, and when I look at the GoogleDriveFile properties for one of my videos with subtitles, I don't see any parameters that look like the subtitles file or a link to the subtitles file, or any other parameters like the language code (en for English, etc.).
At the moment there are no API methods to do this. The Drive API documentation doesn't show any. Also, the metadata for Drive files does not include anything related to captions/subtitles. This means that adding these subtitles is probably done on a different "layer" unique to the Drive player that doesn't affect the files at all, and an API has not been considered for it.
Google also has an API called Transcoder. I'm not familiar with it but after reviewing the documentation it seems that it allows you to transcode videos and add subtitles to them. This would be more complex and would probably require you to download, transcode, and reupload the videos which would end up with built-in subs, but it is something that you could potentially fully automate with APIs.
I followed your steps - downloaded MKVToolnix, opened MKVMerge GUI. Opened the mkv file produced by handbrake, and implemented the settings above. Remuxing took just minutes and the result worked as expected - selectable subtitles!
I scratched my head for days on this, and finally remembered the whole zlip thing, so ran the video through mkvmerge, and zlib compressed the subtitles and now I can play the movie and watch subtitles!
The subtitles on a normal disc are in a PNG format and the WD media players do not recognize this format. First, you have to be able to get the subtitles in a non forced format. Leawo makes a great program called Blu-ray to MKV Converter. This program will allow you to convert the disc to MKV format with the subtitles attached and not forced. Then you have to get the subtitles off of the MKV file and thankfully, there is a program for this (of course) called Subtitle Edit. This beautiful little program will allow you to take subtitles off your file and convert them to the SRT format that the WD media players do recognize. Now you may ask, once I have the subtitles off and converted, how do I put them back on? Great question. I asked it myself, and I found that the wonderful people at MKVToolNix have a software program for that!
The original subtitles of Blu-ray movies are hard subtitles that are written on top of the image permanently. They can not be turned on or off like on the DVD. Only software subtitles that have been added external that will appear as separate select-able tracks in your output file. With the correct playback software, you will be able to enable/disable these subtitles as required.
So many years ago, I went through an extended process of decided which type of file extension I wanted. After testing all that I could do with my software, I decided for the size of the file and the picture quality I wanted, MKV was what worked best. Silly me did not think about needing subtitles at the time because how many movies have a foreign language at some point in the movie right? Just kidding. Way, way more that I ever dreamed.
In some circumstances, Google Drive video captions are a necessity. When hearing-impaired viewers see your video, the spoken text must be readable. And speakers of different languages should be able to access foreign language subtitles.
Use the information in the following sections to add captions and subtitles to a jobconfiguration. This page assumes you are familiar with a basicJobConfig. For more informationon creating transcoding jobs, seeCreating and managing jobs.
Whenever I click on the add subtitles option, it always opens up in C drive. The file that I require is buried deep inside another drive and I do not wish to move them from there. Can I change the default directory that it opens? It doesnt even remember the last/frequently visited folder too. The "open a new video file" does remember last visited folder though.
We're looking to rule out a start time problem, a single edit problem (e.g. the subtitles jump at some point out of sync, and stay out of sync by the same amount), or a problem where the amount of time out of sync gets longer over time.
I don't KEEP them on my hard drive. They are compressed and then I delete the images. Now the compressed files are MKV too so if the subs are present there I guess they could read them but once again, I cannot get the program to even read an MKV file. There may be some setting I am missing but that is why I am here, I want to learn. Thank you.
We'll consider the different options available, including not transcribing at all, and we'll look at the media formats we should be using. We'll explore options for live captions, as well as for automatically and manually generating and editing subtitles and transcripts after the fact. And we'll see how best to share a video with subtitles.
Now perhaps you've got an audio or video file that you're intending to share, and you're wanting to add captions and/or an accompanying transcript in an effort to make the content more accessible. In that case then you are going to need to fully transcribe what's being said. There are tools that can help you with this, and we'll take a look at them in the section on automatically generating subtitles and transcripts after the fact, but it's also going to require some work to get the transcript in a fit state for public consumption.
If you're presenting live, be it in an online setting, or potentially even face to face, there are options available for automatic live subtitling. The quality of automatic subtitling is variable, but for those of your audience who need it, it will be better than no subtitles at all.
PowerPoint and Google Slides can both provide live subtitles. A quick-and-dirty way to record subtitles for a screencast is to piggyback on a PowerPoint presentation.
This approach is ok for quick, dirty subtitles, but they'll contain errors, there's a delay in them appearing (by which time the video has moved on), and they're 'burnt-in' into the video. So really you should look to making some proper stand-alone subtitles... Automatically generating subtitles and transcripts after the fact If you're making a video that has sound, you'll need some subtitles to ensure that your video is as accessible as possible to its audience. If you're recording an interview for research purposes, you might also want to get a transcript of what was said.
Whether you've got an automatically generated set of subtitles, or even just a transcript, it's relatively straightforward to edit those captions, convert those captions to a transcript, or change that transcript into a subtitle file.
Keep in mind that the main purpose for subtitling is to provide audio information to people who cannot hear the sound. But also consider that reading text from a screen is different to hearing it spoken. While verbatim transcription is generally the best approach, it may be necessary to make some changes so that subtitles are more easily read and digested.
There are a number of video hosting options for closed caption videos. The most obvious one is YouTube, but if you want more control over who has access to your video you could choose instead to upload it to Google Drive. YouTube: Translate videos and captionsMenu of pages on subtitling options in YouTubeAdding caption tracks to your video filesGoogle's help page on adding subtitles in Google DriveAnother way of distributing a video with captions is to offer the files for download. VLC Media Player can display captions on a video if it finds a caption file with the same name as the video (not including the file extension) in the same folder location on the computer.
Box does not support captions/subtitles as separate files. If you have a video with a separate subtitle file (e.g. .srt), you will need to embed the subtitle file into your video file using one of the methods outlined below.
When you preview a video file that includes a subtitle track/closed captioning, you will see a button marked CC in the preview window. Clicking this button will toggle captions on or off. If your video includes multiple subtitle/caption tracks for different languages, you can select a specific subtitle track by opening the Settings menu (Gear icon) and clicking Subtitles/CC. Select the appropriate subtitle track and subtitles will be displayed at the bottom of the screen.
If, for some reason, you cannot upload your film, you can still deliver DCP and ProRes files using hard drives. However, the full cost of transport including customs fees and insurance, as well as the return freight, must be borne by the sender.
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