Info: Subtitles and tsMuxer

Does anyone know how to add subtitles with tsMuxer?  I must be missing something.  I’m trying to make a Japanese dubbed Star Wars (Harmy’s 2.0) with English subs.  I add the MKV (only keeping the Japanese language)  I then add English subs and run output as AVCHD.  Once tsMuxer is done, I play it back but the subtitles aren’t there.  Am I missing some crucial step?  I freely admit I’m no expert at this stuff but I’ve not run into any problems so far.  I just don’t get why the subs don’t show up.  Anyone know what I’m doing wrong or what I’m missing?

I find it easier to use SUP files than SRT files for subtitles.  I'd use the 720p SUP files from Project Threepio (not included in the Project Threepio folder that came with the MKV, but available on MySpleen).  Just add that as a stream just as you'd add an audio track, and be sure to label it with the appropriate language.

Theoretically, I suppose you could still use the SRT file with tsMuxerGUI, but I've never tried that so I don't know if it will work, or how to troubleshoot it.

As for "showing up", that could just be a matter of software.  If you play it in an actual hardware player, subtitles should work if they're present.  MPC-HC shows HD subtitles, but helpfully not under the subtitles menu, but under the filters menu.  VLC recently added HD subtitle support so there may still be bugs.  Depending on how you were playing it back, your AVCHD may have been fine all along.

EDIT: Oh yeah, keep in mind that the English subs are timed to the English dialogue, so they may show early/late for the Japanese dialogue.

Two more things: First, when you mux in a sub, that doesn't mean it displays by default.  You still need to select it during playback to make it show up.  Second, if you go through the trouble of getting the SUP files from Project Threepio, you'll discover that there's complete Japanese subs in there (the SRT files only have forced subs).  You may then prefer to have English audio with Japanese subs.

I would like to create a subtitle file for a Blu-ray I'm planning to burn. It's an original film, so I am starting from scratch; I have already transcribed all of the dialogue, I need to know how to time it to the film and create the correct type of file. Can anybody direct me as to where to start with such a thing?

It really depends on how fancy you want to get. Since you're starting from scratch, you have the freedom to map it all out.

If you just want subtitles without any interesting formatting (i.e. beyond italics), and placement is going to be in a consistent, standard location, then just create an SRT file using any of the tons of subtitle editors out there.  I actually prefer SRT because I can focus on the content and not the presentation.  However, if you want to get all fancy and have subtitles that are (for example) positioned under the speaker of that particular line, go for a more advanced format that can contain positioning information such as ASS.  You can make this exactly as complicated as you like.

As for timing, different editors offer different ways of doing it.  Some allow you to line up the subtitles to the waveform of the audio track, but I actually prefer to do it visually by watching a preview of the movie with the subtitles overlaid.  There is a lot of trial and error and guesswork, but generally it's pretty clear when a subtitle "works" and when it doesn't.

To convert an SRT file to a BD-SUP/BDN+XML format for burning to disc, I recommend easySUP.  This gives you a lot of flexibility about typeface, positioning, color, border/shadow, etc.  Some BD authoring tools may allow you to plug in an SRT file too, but I doubt you'll end up with quite the level of control easySUP gives you.  Also keep in mind you need to install AviSynth for easySUP to work.

I'd also look at some subtitling style guidelines, even if you opt not to follow them to the letter.  The BBC has some pretty thorough ones online, I believe.

Thank you very much!!!

Sure.

The Despecialized Edition contains an M2TS file, which is the video and audio all "muxed" together into a single file.  (This is from memory, I may be skipping some important steps, so you may need to experiment)  Open that file on tsmuxerGUI, and then add the 720p SUP file from Project Threepio.  Then set the target to either AVCHD or Blu-ray, depending on what you're making, and that will create a new folder structure.  Then you can use ImgBurn to actually put this on a disc.  Some of this is explained in the Project Threepio README.

Yes, there’s a few programs that clip the last line from SRT files, not just tsMuxer. That’s part of why I like to pre-render SUP files, to avoid that and many other little software quirks out there. If you want the SUP files, send me a PM. They’re nice, but a little large 😉

Ah, those subtitles are what’s called “burnt-in”, they are part of the picture itself.

The short answer is: because The Despecialized Editions are reconstructions of the theatrical versions, and the alien subtitles were burnt-in in the theatres too – so failing to have burnt-in subtitles wouldn’t be authentic. Other preservations, such as the German “Krieg der Sterne” preservation, have burnt-in German subtitles (and an alternate German crawl and credits), because prints shown in Germany looked like that. Similar projects exist for other print variations: Italian and French, maybe others.

The longer answer is that the alternative methods are much harder to make feel authentic, and require some odd authoring. On DVD downscales, it’s simply impossible to have separate subtitles look as good as burnt-in – the DVD format’s subtitle specs are flat-out awful. On Blu-rays, you can emulate the look very accurately, but things like having a very slight wobble (gate weave) on the subtitles, which is authentic, require animating the subtitles as a series of one-frame images, which isn’t well supported by some players, and can end up looking terrible or unreadable. Then, if you end up doing it anyway, then you have to auto-select the subtitle track when authoring, and make sure all of your alternate tracks still include those lines (right now, the English subtitles exclude those lines). And lastly, the Blu-ray format is limited in the total number of subtitle tracks you can have, so making them into a separate subtitle track means you need to possibly throw out one alternate language track, if you were maxing out your disc (and the Despecialized Editions definitely try to push the envelope on languages). It’s all technically doable to some degree, but there are trade-offs.

The ideal way to handle all of this is through seamless branching – have burnt-in subtitles for each of the known print variations: English, German, etc, on their own video branch, and then have a subtitle-free branch which is shown for other languages with no burnt-in option. It would also work for translated crawls, credits, etc – but seamless branching brings authoring to a whole new level of complexity. But it’s the best option, regardless. IMO having burnt-in English alien subs with translations in other languages shown at the top of the screen is the next best thing, and considerably easier to accomplish.

All of this is another reason why I really push the SUP files hard, and only recommend the SRT files for people who cannot use the SUP files. Among the other things they help with, they shift the translations for the burnt-in alien subtitles up to the top of the screen, so that they don’t clutter the bottom of the screen with subtitles in two languages, or worse, overlap them! You can see examples of this in the first post of the Project Threepio thread (click the Project Threepio logo in my signature)

Yes, I realize the Despecialized Editions include the SRT files instead of the SUP files. Harmy and I disagree on that point, and it’s his project to do what he wants with – not that I won’t keep trying to convince him.

Bah! I’m a sucker for talking about subtitles, are you kidding? Normally nobody wants to talk about such a boring topic.

So for a sub-free version–nothing pre-made exists (not in the Harmy-quality league anyway) that I know of. However, Harmy does maintain sub-free sections of his DeEd’s to share with, for example, the Krieg der Sterne people, so that they have a blank template on which to make their own burnt-in subtitles. I believe it was also going to included as an extra on the hypothetical Blu-ray. But you’d have to splice the video together and re-encode it yourself, though.

I can’t give you exactly what you’re looking for, but there is something else about the graphical subtitles you may be interested to know. There are some utilities in the project that allow you to “reframe” the subtitles–make them fit into a differently-sized video frame. For example, for Puggo’s 16mm preservations, you need to scoot them in toward the middle of the screen about 4.5% so that they have about the same position within the video frame. Well… if you feed the utility a number like -100% instead of 4.5%, it scoots the subtitles away from the middle of the screen, as far as they can go, right into the black bars.

The problem is that subtitles that were already shifted to the top of the frame are adjusted into the top black bar. So to work around that, there’s another utility you could run first, designed to modify the subtitles to work on video that doesn’t have burnt-in subs, and that will shift the alien subtitles back down to the bottom.

So you run the unshift subs utility to put the alien subs on the bottom, the reframe subs utility to put them in the black bars, and you’re almost there… except you’ve still got burnt-in subtitles and also the crawl subtitles are still in the top black bar, so no, it’s not exactly what you want, but you gave me an excuse to talk about it.

Well, here’s an interesting tidbit I just found out. It certainly looks like frame-accurate subtitles are not actually possible in either the SUP or BDN+XML formats (the two graphical formats). This is because for some reason, the internal timings are stored at a fixed 24.000fps, in a weird hybrid seconds+frames format, and are converted to 23.976fps values on the fly. This is usually not a problem but every now and then, something just won’t come out on the exact right frame. Which means we can add frame accuracy to the reasons to burn the theatrical alien subtitles in.

Not that frame accuracy matters at all for your typical subtitles, so maybe this issue never concerned the people writing the specs. But still, I feel like this is crappy because it’s a self-inflicted technical limitation that they could have pretty easily avoided. In fact, the way timing is handled seems so needlessly complicated, I don’t even…

Is there an easy way to make a subtitle play automatically when starting the disk? MKVToolNix has an option to mark a subtitle as “standard” but tsmuxer doesn’t. I’d like to have this to have German “titles” subtitles to the Silver Screen Edition of Star Wars.