How to integrate VOBSUB subtitles (.idx,.sub) in Subs folder into MKV?

Lemmchen@feddit.org · 3 days ago

How to integrate VOBSUB subtitles (.idx,.sub) in Subs folder into MKV?

Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 2 days ago

If you arent afraid of remuxing: use mkvtoolnix
Optionally has a GUI.

Juat so you know: If the name is identical to the mkv + the suffix .de.sub some media libraries automatically detect them and you can use them as is without altering the media file.
Jellyfin for example lists the file as “Ger Sub - External” in the subtitle list.
Just make sure to stay consistent or use sonarr/bazarr instead.

AnEilifintChorcra@sopuli.xyz · 2 days ago

I like https://github.com/ruediger/VobSub2SRT

for f in ./*.sub; do
    vobsub2srt --blacklist "\/_~" "${f%.*}"; done

And then https://mkvtoolnix.download/ to remove any unwanted subtitles from the mkv files

for f in ./*.mkv; do
    outdir="nosubs"
    mkvmerge -o "${outdir}/$f" --no-subtitles "$f"; done

I find that it never recognises “I” properly and always defaults to “|” which is easier to replace than random characters that would appear if I blacklist “|” So, then I run

sed -i 's/|/I/g' *.srt

Finally, I merge the srt files with the mkv files

for f in ./nosubs/*.mkv; do
    outdir=addedsubs
    g="${f##*/}"
    mkvmerge -o "${outdir}/$g" "$f" --language 0:ger --track-name 0:German "${g%.*}".srt; done

Once the files in the addedsubs directory look good, I delete all of the other files. You can add it all to a bash file or make an alias or both and run it wherever

Lemmchen@feddit.org · edit-2 2 days ago

I’m pretty sure MKV can handle VOBSUB. Why do you convert them to .srt before merging them?

Edit:

I’ve also just found this: https://github.com/elizagamedev/vobsubocr

The most comparable tool to vobsubocr is VobSub2SRT, but vobsubocr has significantly better output, especially for non-English languages, mainly because VobSub2SRT does not do much preprocessing of the image at all before sending it to Tesseract. For example, Tesseract 4.0 expects black text on a white background, which VobSub2SRT does not guarantee, but vobsubocr does. Additionally, vobsubocr splits each line into separate images to take advantage of page segmentation method 7, which greatly improves accuracy of non-English languages in particular.

Edit 2:

And a fork of it, of course: https://github.com/gwen-lg/subtile-ocr

As you seems to not update this project anymore, I have done a fork to continue the project. With subtile-ocr I have use subtile subtile is a fork no longer maintained vobsub crate. With this I was able to :

modernise the code by :

update dependencies, especially nom who need a lot of code modification.

migrate to thiserror and anyhow for error management

do some small optim (by reducing a lot the memory allocation count) And it could be a better start to add functionality (like managing .sup: blue-ray subtitle format).

Bakkoda@sh.itjust.works · 2 days ago

Iirc vobsub is not text so while you can add it to the container it will always require a transcode on plex/jelly/etc to burn in.

Lemmchen@feddit.org · 2 days ago

I wasn’t aware of the transcoding requirement, thank you. So I guess converting the subtitles is a best practice I should adopt.

Zedstrian@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 3 days ago

MKVToolNix Batch Tool should be able to do it automatically, assuming the subtitle format is supported.

Lemmchen@feddit.org · 3 days ago

MKVToolNix Batch Tool works on Windows 32-bit (x86) and Windows 64-bit (x64) operating systems,

Unfortunately I’m a Linux user.

OutOfMemory@sh.itjust.works · 3 days ago

Works fine on my Fedora install with the gui, haven’t tried just the batch tool.