It’s great that Shotcut now supports subtitles. However, one problem I’ve found no solution for is MPG files with optional subtitles.
My particular use case is the following: I bought a DVD box set of a TV show several years ago. To avoid detoriation of the discs I tried to create ISO images for digital preservation, which didn’t work, thanks to a stupid digital protection mechanism that punishes honest buyers. What did work, though, was recording the screen display using VLC with English subtitles enabled.
The resulting MPG files are huge (on average more than 1.5 GB for 45 min episodes), and the subtitles are still optional. Is there a way to just activate the subtitles in the MPG file and burn them into the exported new file? I tried Handbrake, but it doesn’t recognise the subtitles either.
You know that .SRT file format people talk about here and elsewhere? It was created by a tool called SubRip. DVD subtitles are actually images. Read the SubRip description and you find out that it uses optical character recognition to convert them to text! Shotcut’s Properties > Extract Subtitles is unable to handle these kinds of subtitles. I hope that helps.
And btw, I don’t want to extract text. I just want want to burn the English subtitles (pixels) into the exported mp4 videos, because those mpg files are unneccessarily huge.
That depends on the format of the embedded metadata - and you have not told us that. If the files contain SRT subtitle data, then you can use the extraction feature in Shotcut. But your hint that the files are ripped from DVDs suggests that the subtitles are probably images. Shotcut can not extract the image subtitles or convert them to SRT. So you need to use another program (such as SubRip) to do that.
I know this is going to sound like a very pedantic response, but here are the technical details:
The text you see displayed in VLC are not subtitles. They are closed captions (defined by EIA608). The closed caption information is embedded in the video data itself (not metadata in the container format). Shotcut does not support converting closed caption data into subtitle data. But maybe with some googling you can find a tool that can do it.
I have never tried this, but here is an article that came up in my google search that shows how to extract the closed caption with FFMpeg command line:
Shotcut does not directly display any embedded subtitles or captions. Its Subtitles view is text/data-oriented ala SRT. It has text filters, and they can render the Subtitles text data. It has limited support to extract some embedded subtitles into a SRT file which can then be imported to use with the Subtitles view and Text: Simple filter.
Thanks for your information, which was helpful to understand the issue.
However, I still don’t want to extract the subtitles, but simply activate them and create a new and smaller mp4 or mkv file with the subtitle pixels ‘burned in’.
However, in your specific case, you can not do step #2 because your file has captions, not subtitles. So you would need to extra steps to convert the captions to subtitles in an external application.
