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How to Subtitle Your Videos
By: Siddharth Bhatia   |   Apr 22,2008

So you remove your DVD remotes, put in City of God DivX CD that you have illegally downloaded/ripped, and voila! No subtitles. You won’t understand even the swear words, so what’s the point? In India we make movies in a zillion languages, yet good films are few and far between. We also have homegrown videos, where intelligibility of speech and vision is a debatable issue. So subtitles are a part of your DVD architecture that can make life a lot easier.

No worries, here are some tips for retrieving subtitles from the net, adding your own subs, changing their color etc. I've added pointers on how to resync your subtitles if they go out of sync, as that also happens a lot, yielding funny lip movements. On a frank and serious note, these issues never arise in an original DVD or official download, and it actually is less stressful watching good ol’ box packs. But for anti-DRM folks out there, there's more...

Resources for Subtitles
The first and best way to get your subtitles is to rip it out of the DVD. Let's run through the process. There are quite a few methods and softwares that do it, but I go by the following process.

First get yourself VobSub from here. This is a free subtitle filtering utility that works on the Directshow environment. The files associated with it are .sub and .idx. There are other types of subtitle files; we will encounter them as we go along. VobSub is important as it is anyway needed to play subtitles for any AVI file in software media players, provided the .sub and .idx file are in the same directory as the movie, and with the same name.


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hey i hv downloaded a movie with high definition graphics.can i play this on my 15"crt monitor?if yes then please tell me how?
shivam @ Jul 03,2008
but while re-encoding the size of the file gets reduced by around 200 MB (if source file is 700MB).....is there any way to avoid this.
hOLLA @ Apr 26,2008
Hi 'N'. you have obviously not understood what the writer was saying, though it is very simply laid out.If it is DivX then you don't NEED to hard sub anything, as the standard allows for objects like subtitles to be decoded, as separate files in the DivX folder...
If you want to watch on a old DVD player(no DivX), or just want permanent subtitles embedded in the video itself, then you can 'hardsub', on the PC. Use the software mentioned and then save as divX/ Xvid cd and it will play on your player, without having to choose anything.
shaan @ Apr 26,2008
Your article shares a lot of information but provides very little help. I have a Sony DVD-DivX player that doesn't recognize .srt or .sub files. But if it's part of the DivX file, it reads it. When I mean part of it, you have the option of turning it off or on, and not "hard-subbing" it as you say.

Any ideas?
N @ Apr 25,2008
been there done that... :P
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Master of Audio/Video Encoding
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TUX @ Apr 25,2008
i use "Subtitle Workshop"
easy to use and supports almost all types of formats

@Kailash
AVImux is used for muxing (combining) audio and video into "avi" container
HiTmAn @ Apr 25,2008
Why is that all your articles are PC centric. You rarely provide anything for Mac users. Although Mac has many built in software but some light on it would be helpful. or do you think mac users do not need to put subtitles!
harsh @ Apr 23,2008
in virtualdub, you need to:
press ctrl F, go to add filters...and use TEXTSUB...it will show up as TEXTSUB...then you can select the subtitle file and it will be hardsubed
siddharth @ Apr 23,2008
i keep hearing of AVImux whats that for? and i installed vobsub and use subtitles files as you mentioned, it works ok when i play on PC, but when sing virtualdub i'm having problem, there iis no choice od vobsub in the filters...
kailash @ Apr 23,2008
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