I
guess you'll agree with me that most DVD ripping tools out there handle
video and audio pretty well but unfortunately just do not manage
subtitles that good at all. They either "burn" the subtitles on the
video which means you cannot turn them off or create .sub files. In the
other hand, .srt subtitles is much more handy than any of the choices
above. It's plain text, so it is small sized and can be formated by the
player to the liking of the user. Also it is very easy to merge in
containers like mkv so that you can have video, audio and subtitles in
one file.
So the best solution is to create the video file using
the DVD rip program of your choice and then rip the subtitles using
something else. In this guide we will use one of the most popular
programs that can do this task, SubRip.
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Load SubRip and in the main window click the "VOB" button in the
toolbar (it is the very first one). The window above will open. First,
you will have to click Open
IFO
and load the first .IFO file of the DVD. That will probably be
VTS_01_0.IFO. After you load it, check the filenames to make sure
everything is OK, there should be 4 or more VOB files of a big size
(size appears in the right). Make sure you select all of them but the
first, and right at the top select the Language stream you
want to rip.
In
the right part of the window, leave Characters matrix file to New File
(we will explain what that means at the end) and make sure "SubPictures to Text via OCR"
is selected in the Actions
option. Finally, click Start
to begin the ripping process. |
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SubRip
is using OCR (optical character recognition) to convert the subtitles,
which in the DVD are stored as images, to text. Because of that you'll
need to manually input each character the first time SubRip finds it.
It may sound like a big job, but usually in 5-10 minutes you will enter
everything SubRip needs to continue the ripping automatically.
You
can see an example dialog above. All you have to do is check the blue
character in the image, enter it below and click OK. Just make sure you
enter the correct one (they are case-sensitive) or the subtitle created
will have dozens of errors. |
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Above
you can see SubRib working. Usually ripping a 2 hour movie's subtitles
after you're done with the manual character input takes a little less
than an hour. Just make sure you are around, since SubRip might find an
unrecognizable character anytime, and of course halt the ripping
process waiting for your input. |
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When it is finished you have to save to .srt file. Click the save
button as shown in the image above and your subtitles file is ready!
Before you close SubRip it would be a good idea to save the Characters Matrix,
so check the next step as well. |
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The Characters Matrix file holds all OCR information that we inputted
manually before, so it's a very good idea to save it by selecting Characters Matrix -> Save
Characters Matrix File As. Then you can load it in Step 1
in the next DVD you will rip in order to save yourself time by not
starting the recognition process all over again, but instead just enter
any extra characters SubRip can't understand.
This pretty much concludes this simple guide for ripping the subtitles
from a DVD. Of course SubRip is a much more advanced utility with many
more options that we may explain in future guide. Until then
feel free to use our forum
for any question. |
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"?" is the character, that when the program comes across, I only have the option to assign a character to the left dot on the top of the "?". I want to be able to encircle the whole "?" and then assign the proper character to it.