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

Lemmchen · 3 months ago

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

AnEilifintChorcra@sopuli.xyz · edit-2 3 months ago

EDIT: https://github.com/gwen-lg/subtile-ocr is better than https://github.com/ruediger/VobSub2SRT Subtitle-ocr had no issue with recognising “I” as “I” while vobsub2srt constantly sees “I” as “|” and blacklisting “|” causes “I” to be recognised as “]” and blacklisting “|” “[” and “]” just leaves a blank space so thanks for the recommendation! I’ll be using that to convert VOBSUB to srt instead

for f in ./*.idx; do
    subtile-ocr -l ger -o "${f%.*}.srt" "$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

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 · edit-2 3 months 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 With subtile-ocr I have use subtile subtile is a fork no longer maintained vobsub crate.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 · 3 months 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 · 3 months ago

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

Bakkoda@sh.itjust.works · 3 months ago

If vobsub is image based (pretty sure it is) then it needs an OCR converter. Most streaming setups will burn the image based subs in. Honestly for 1080p and lower a modern cpu/gpu won’t miss a beat.

AnEilifintChorcra@sopuli.xyz · 3 months ago

Yeah, mkv can handle VOBSUB. I just prefer text based like srt or ass since you can edit the subtitles to get better timings or changing font/ colour or fix spellings really easily. I also find the VOBSUB a bit blurry around the edges of the text.

If you’re happy with the VOBSUB, then the last bit of code above will merge them with the mkv file and they should be automatically on when using vlc.

Thanks for the links, I was thinking about how outdated vobsub2srt was and definitely want to try these instead!