Ripping Subtitles to SRT with SubRip

Ripping Subtitles to SRT with SubRip
by Michael Healy @ 9:15 am on April 25th, 2009 in codecs, movie library, subtitles with No Comments and Permalink

SubRip So you forgot to include subtitles while ripping your movie collection, what do you do now? Luckily, the solution isn’t to go back through the entire process and do it over again. You will need to break those DVDs back out of storage, however. Today we’ll use a program called SubRip to analyze the subtitles of each movie and save them as a text based file called an SRT. This SRT file is readable by most decoders including FFDShow and DirectVobSub.

Before we get started we need to have a few tools ready. First off you’ll need to have a way around any disk encryption present. The easiest and most expedient way to do this without having to rip the entire disk over again is to use AnyDVD. AnyDVD is a tool that any Media Center enthusiast should have available and is well worth the price. We’ll cover this tool more in-depth at a later time.

For now, we’ll obviously also need to have SubRip downloaded and installed. Download the latest version of SubRip and extract the files to your hard drive. Upon launching SubRip you’ll quickly notice that the interface is somewhat less than intuitive.

SubRip Interface

With the DVD in the drive and AnyDVD running press the VOB button in the toolbar. This will bring up a dialog allowing you to choose the file to rip subtitles from. Press the Open IFO button and browse to the DVD drive, then into the Video_TS folder. Each set of files in this directory corresponds to a track on the DVD, select the IFO file of the track that you ripped your movie from. If you’ve selected a track that contains subtitles an information dialog should appear and the language stream dropdown box will be populated.

Select Subtitle Track

SubRip will also automatically select all the matching VOB files from the disk that go with this track. Before beginning it’s worth noting that after running SubRip successfully you’ll be given the option to save a character matrix file. Subtitles do not exist as text on the disk and are instead images that need to be translated into text by SubRip.

During processing SubRip will prompt you to help it with deciphering the images into text and will “learn” as the process goes on. Loading this file each time will result in SubRip becoming more efficient in processing your DVDs’ subtitles saving you quite a bit of time. For now press “Start” to begin processing subtitles for this track.

SubRip Output

For complete subtitles be sure to uncheck the “Forced Subtitles Only” checkbox under Options –> Global Options. Enabling forced subtitles will only extract subtitles for sections of the movie which would display subtitles regardless of the subtitle setting of the player. For example, foreign dialog in an otherwise native language movie would be forced subtitles.

As mentioned above, during processing you’ll be prompted to correct any characters that SubRip can’t decipher into plain text. A small dialog box will appear where you will be required to enter all the letters inside the highlighted area. Only enter the highlighted characters from inside the red box into the input box then press “OK”.

SubRip Character Correction

During processing you’ll notice that SubRip has learned these characters and no longer asks you to verify them manually. Once the process has completed you’ll be given the option to save these manual entries to a character file which you can load next time, saving you from having to enter them again.

Once the movie has finished save the text output by pressing the floppy disk icon in the Subtitles window. Choose you desired font and size then save the SRT file to your movie’s directory.

Save SRT File

Most decoders will now pickup the SRT files contained in the movie directory. If you still don’t receive subtitles you may want to check your codec setup. FFDShow by default will load the file that comes first alphabetically if multiple files are in the same directory which is something you may want to keep in mind if you are using multiple subtitle files.