Improving the Subtitle and Caption Tools
Improving the ability of Shotcut to support subtitles has been a frequently requested suggestion.
You can look at numerous previous posts on the forum asking for them:
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Benefits
- According to the WHO, currently more than 1.5 billion people live with hearing loss.
- It will allow people to still hear people talking in bad audio conditions (such as due to wind, various noises, or the speaker being too far away from the microphone).
- It will allow people not fluent in the language to still understand more easily what the speaker says.
- It is helpful to create translation subtitles for foreign languages, such as a foreign movie, foreign anime, speaker talking in a foreign language, etc.
To Do (in order of importance)
Allowing Shotcut to import subtitles from .srt files and directly burning the subtitles on the video.
Making the workflow to add or edit subtitles more user-friendly. OpenShot (example), for instance, has a far more user-friendly and complete way of burning subtitles to a video. This is partially in progress.
Allowing people to work on subtitles in Shotcut and then export them later to a .srt file.
Embedding .srt files and AC3 audio streams in MP4/MKV containers without re-encoding for faster and cleaner renders, allowing subtitles to be enabled or disabled during playback.