According to WHO about half a billion people have disability hearing loss (about 1 person in 16).
Many people can’t or don’t turn on audio (e.g. 85% of facebook videos are watched on mute).
Research has shown many people prefer to watch videos with subtitles switched on.
Not everyone speaks your language (English 25%, Chinese 20%, Spanish 10%, Arabic 5%).
Viewers are more engaged. Research has shown that on average non-subtitled videos were watched to 66% completion while for those with subtitles it was 90%.
Subtitled videos improve your social media ranking.
Why don’t more people create subtitles for their videos? Mainly because it is tedious, which is why I have created a SubRip Subtitle Generator to simplify it somewhat. Subtitles can be burned into the video using several software applications, including shotcut. But they don’t have to be hard-coded in this way: SubRip (.srt) subtitle files can be included in AVI, MP4, MKV etc containers and various video players can use these.
The generator is an HTML file that you download and use to create the SubRip text that can be copy-pasted into a simple text editor (like Notepad++) and saved as a “.srt” file that you can upload to video platforms like YouTube and Vimeo, or can include in the video file container itself (Google it). You can even feed the SubRip text into Google translate and instantly get new SubRip text for storing in a French, German, Japanese … version of the subtitles.
Very nice , well done.
There is however one thing that would make it much easier to work with, audio waveform display.
This would make “synching” up the subtitles much quicker and easier by simply scrubbing to a point where the audio waveform starts or ends.
I agree and I’ve looked at ways to achieve this. There is an <audio> tag in HTML to complement the <video> tag I use in this web-app and I will have a look at how I might use this to produce a waveform, I’ve seen several examples on the web and am particularly interested by https://wavesurfer-js.org/. One problem would be to ensure that the audio and video stay in sync.
Oh wow, very cool tool. I was just thinking about subtitle software yesterday. I sometimes have to make content for my job and YouTube’s captioning tool is rather clumsy. Thanks for making this, I’ll try it out next time I have to make a video for work!
@Elusien,
Hi … I am using Aegisub mainly today but I think your tool is easier to use. Something I can use to collaborate with other friends and family who will find Aegisub a little daunting.
One question tho’ can this tool be adapted to add subtitle for an audio .mp3 file directly ?
I suppose if not I have to import into SC and export with a color frame to .mp4.
Whilst you are considering extra options and changes for your handy subtitler,
why not make it completely “off-line”?
I see there are references to jquery, a css file and a font file which are online.
If these had to be included in a zipped download, it would make all dependencies available.
By popular request the SubRip Generator is now an offline tool and no longer requires an internet connection to work. The new version is available for download on the website.
The jQuery and Fontawesome Javascript files are now included in the actual HTML file.
If you do have an internet connection it will use the Google font “Source Code Pro”, if not, it will use a monospaced font on your system.
Version 2.0 is now available on the website (http://www.elusien.co.uk/shotcut/) and the description there has been updated. New features are:
The ability to subtitle audio files as well as videos.
The name of the media is now selectable (it no longer has to be “video.mp4”).
Supports more file formats (.mp4, .webm, .ogg, .mp3, .flacc, .wav).
A waveform display is provided of the audio that is kept in sync with the video/audio. N.B. the complete audio track has to be processed to produce the waveform, so please be patient. For a 10min video it takes 5 to 10 seconds. You can still process subtitles while waiting.
Speed controls to play the media at different rates (0.2x, 0.5x, 1x, 2c, 5x).
