Altering Subtitles

[Dark Ariel7]

This one may be a bit of a tricky one. I want to be able to change the definition of the subtitles of my videos. I have some downloads from really old stuff that have horrible subs. I can see the pixels. I want to change the subs to be more sharp and if possible change them to white subs instead of yellow. These are soft subs by the way. Im not a total dork.

[sanahtlig]

I've enlarged the font on subtitles before for my visually impaired friend.  It's kind of a pain, because there's redundant mechanisms in place that manage subtitles, and only some of the settings actually do anything.  It's going to be specific to the set of codecs and filters you currently have installed.  Expect to spend an hour or so tinkering with settings until you find something that works.

 

You really shouldn't be able to see pixels though if they're soft subs, unless there's some weird aliasing going on due to stretch artifacts.

[Kelebek1]

Get a program to extract the container, like MKV Demux or MKVExtractif they're MKV files, and you can edit the sub file with any text editor. Then mux them together again via the same program. There's tonnes of programs around for the standard container formats.

[Heizei_koukousei]

Get a program to extract the container, like MKV Demux or MKVExtractif they're MKV files, and you can edit the sub file with any text editor. Then mux them together again via the same program. There's tonnes of programs around for the standard container formats.

I have always used MKVtoolnix and that did everything I needed and more. Are the other programs you mentioned pretty user friendly as well?

[Zakamutt]

This one may be a bit of a tricky one. I want to be able to change the definition of the subtitles of my videos. I have some downloads from really old stuff that have horrible subs. I can see the pixels. I want to change the subs to be more sharp and if possible change them to white subs instead of yellow. These are soft subs by the way. Im not a total dork.

While you might not be able to change the sub color with it (I doubt that is hard but anyway), using mpc-hc with xy-subfilter you can actually have arbitrarily (I think...) large sharp subtitles. I recommend using KCP for the lazy (I am lazy). Note that only the experimental build uses it, and that you might need a decent bit of CPU power.

 

Sub color might be as easy as opening it in notepad and changing some formatting codes, otherwise there's always subbing programs like substation alpha or whatever people use these days. You will need to do the split/merge steps people above talk about though. There might also be some way to just force your settings through a control panel on xy-subfilter or whatever, but idk.

[Dark Ariel7]

If you did not believe me about the pixels:

I hate those subs... But going to the trouble of actually ripping them out fixing them and sticking them back in sounds even worse. I mean there is so many freakin' episodes. Is there no way outside of this? Has no one come up with an automatic way?

[zoom909]

I seem to remember that one of either MPC or VLC, can't remember which one, will let you override the sub font

 

But if you're going to keep the show, you might as well edit the subs to your liking.  It's easy.

You can experiment with a single line (of normal dialogue) in Substation Alpha to look the way you want.

Then you can do seearch and replace to change a whole bunch at a time

 

You don't even have to mux the subs back.  You can be lazy like me and leave them separate.

As long as your .ass in the same folder as the video with the same filename, it will play back OK.