Rip PGS to SRT on the fly

[fredellini]

hi makemkv team,
i installed a trial version and i am willing to buy the software if it can achieve the following thing:
it should rip the subtitle as SRT and not PGS!
we are living in the 21century and text should look great on every screen so it has to be a vector scaled thing.
i don't know why the makers of the bluray format kept images as the standard subtitle format (probably somebody liked those old dvd days too much).

also this would make created mkvs with subtitles more playable (i have to use vlc to just see the pgs subtitles, the support for other devices is weak).
srt is textbased and looks sharp even on 8k screens.

all my best
fredellini

[Woodstock]

Doubt that what you ask for will happen within MakeMKV - it isn't a simple task.

As you said, PGS is a graphic image, just like VOBSUB. Creating an SRT from that requires doing a text recognition step which is not particularly reliable or fast. Even when it is accurate, you lose all styling done on the subtitle.

Even support for SRT is limited in a lot of devices. And some that do, you have to play with settings to get the text to appear "properly", because SRT does not have the flexibility of, say, SSA/AAS subtitles to change colors and font on individual words to enhance visibility. When I convert MKV files for devices that don't handle PGS, I'll have handbrake burn them in, because they'll at least be readable.

[Chetwood]

it should rip the subtitle as SRT and not PGS!

No, it should not! It should make MKVs and that's what it does. There's already OCR tools out there that you can use.

(probably somebody liked those old dvd days too much).

Right, if they were going with the times, they would have skipped puny SRTs and went with SSA anyway, which allows positioned and coloured subs of several speakers at once.

[fredellini]

No, it should not! It should make MKVs and that's what it does. There's already OCR tools out there that you can use.

yes, it should make mkvs - with everything that belongs to a good mkv (video, audio and subtitles).
whats the use of a mkv with subtitles that i can't play on another device than vlc?
why is it so hard to provide an all in one working solution? i will spend my bucks easily but using manual tools and remux everything is just a waste of time.
and i am surely not the only one. makemkv is by far out on of the easiest tool to archive blurays, but it can be perfect.
and if it slows down the ripping, why not make it optional? if you want to run on fast tracks use pgs and if you want quality go with text subtitles.
yes, ssa is even better than srt. why they aren't working on this as a standard? tesla is working on good electric cars these days, why not building the best ripping program?
and if there are good tools, why not colaborate with the authors? whats holding you back?

[Woodstock]

You argue that SRT=quality. It doesn't. If the player has a crappy font selection, it can look HORRID. My collection of hardware players, all their fonts suck. I have a choice of 8 colors. I can change the text size. There isn't even a border around them so that you can see them atop the same-color background. If there is no wrapping of text in the subtitle itself AND the font size is big enough to read, it exceeds the width of the screen. This is quality?

And text recognition isn't perfect. Are you going to be happy with 95% of the text being correct? Is that your metric for "quality"?

"Perfect" is in the mind of the person looking at something. You describe a program that, to me, could be a nightmare, because it doesn't implement feature "X" the "right way". What if someone else's vision of "perfect" includes recoding the video on the fly to h.265, and your player only does h.264?

The reason MakeMKV is "simple to use" is that it is NOT trying to be everything to everyone. You want "just one more feature" to make it perfect for you, and you want to use it today.

I happen to be old-fashioned enough to appreciate the philosophy of picking tools that do things well, and making a work flow out of them, rather than relying upon a all-in-one that doesn't do any of them well. Brookstone used to sell a tool that was a combination of a hammer, pry-bar, pliers, wire cutter, a jaw that could be used to grip pipes, and I think it even had a screwdriver bit incorporated in it somewhere. It you were installing barbed-wire fencing and didn't have room to carry more than one tool, it was "perfect". But, for around the house, it wasn't a good hammer, it was cumbersome to get NEAR any wire you needed to cut, the hammer head got in the way of using it as pliers, etc.

When I first got BDs, I was ticked off about PGS subtitles, and the lack of support for them "anywhere". Players didn't handle PGS. If you wanted to create an MP4 file, you couldn't include the PGS (technically, you can't include VOBSUB, but there are work-arounds for that) except by burning them in. I wanted a tool that would convert them to something else... and every one I found either didn't work well, or was dependent upon something I didn't have. The "fix" was to upgrade the players.

[Chetwood]

whats the use of a mkv with subtitles that i can't play on another device than vlc?

So, it's MakeMKV's fault that your standalones suck? My WDTVs have no issues with PGS subs.

and if there are good tools, why not colaborate with the authors? whats holding you back?

The fact that OCRing is a completetly different shoe compared to muxing?

[smares]

MakeMKV is a ripper. The Blu-rays have the subtitles stored as image, so that's what MakeMKV rips. Some Blu-rays make use of the fact that subtitles are images and style the subtitles accordingly (see Avatar for example), some don't and the text looks just like plain old Arial. What holds you back from loading the SUPs in something that does OCR and creates SRTs and then mux the SRT to the MKV?

[fredellini]

many things, first of all why should i install another program to convert the subttitle and than even another to remux it?
how do i even get the pgs subtitle ripped as a file for the first step? it seems i need another program to only achieve this simply task.
why is everything splitted down and complicated? as far as i know there not one easy going conversion tool out there that can make it all.
i feel like in the old matrix days where you need to have installed virtualdubmod to do everything in beetween the ripping and the coding process.

what can make makemkv king would be an addon for coding (subtitles, audio, video) which is as simple as the ripping tool.
anyway i am waiting for an anwser from a developer (e.g. mike), it seems that you are not envolved in the tool making.

@chetwood: don't get me wrong i always appreciated your work on dvdshrink (no need for the tool now if you rip with makemkv).
@woodstock: yes you're right - the ocr tools might not get everything perfect, but i am willing to do manual work (if the program tells me where it's unsure)
and yes, the player needs to be uptodate. well on my laptop i can use vlc that supports pgs. the win10 tv&movies app does not yet. also and this is my biggest issue: the lg largo does not support it.
still i am shocked that the bluraystandard won't use vector based subtitle tracks like ssa which should be the standard. and yes why not add an option to rip to h265 (that might be the future thin anyway), it would be cool to have a coding addon for people that want to do more than just rip the content. and you can keep good and simple settings and layout of the program.

[Woodstock]

many things, first of all why should i install another program to convert the subttitle and than even another to remux it?

and

... but i am willing to do manual work (if the program tells me where it's unsure)

It comes down to selection of the best tools for the job. MakeMKV is good for getting the data off the disk. mkvtoolnix includes tools that are excellent for splitting out the PGS subtitles and muxing back in the SRT afterwards.

Which leaves the OCR portion. What's the best OCR tool that recognizes PGS subtitles and can create other formats that meet the standards to be called an SRT file?

If the OCR-convert-to-SRT were part of MakeMKV, and its OCR capabilities were mediocre, would it help or hinder your efforts? Would you be clamoring to have Mike upgrade the OCR because it has trouble determining if a letter is accented? Or would you be happy, just because it is there?

[Chetwood]

anyway i am waiting for an anwser from a developer (e.g. mike), it seems that you are not envolved in the tool making.

No, but we're regulars who have read Mike's replies to similar requests and you better believe he's less than enthuthiastic about adding more pointless clutter like OCR or h.265.

the lg largo does not support it.

Again, MakeMKV IS king in that it already does what it's supposed to do perfectly. If LG is too stupid to catch up to WD which has been supporting PGS since the WDTV Live (2009!), f*ck them.

What's the best OCR tool that recognizes PGS subtitles and can create other formats that meet the standards to be called an SRT file?

DVD Subextractor (which also handles PGS) is the best hands down.

[fredellini]

hey chetwood i downloaded the dvdsubextractor.
and there comes the next problem, that tool won't load the mkv from makemkv.
i need another tool to extract it. mkvtoolnix can show mux streams but not extract the pgs file.
if i uncheck everything except the subtitle makemkv creates a .mks file that is unreadable to your tool.
also renaming .sup won't help.

i found this page that recommends subtitle edit
http://hometheatersns.blogspot.de/2014/ ... m-mkv.html
as you can read in the post i am not the only one thinking that make mkv can be improved.

there seems to be a swiss knife out there:
http://www.multipelife.com/bytecopy
but it looks like it won't provide the speed & quality that makemkv does.

[fredellini]

hey chetwood, your tool does not load mkvs ripped with makemkv.
it looks like i have to create a whole new image and i am not willing to do that because of a weak program.
also i cannot demux the pgs with mkvtoolnix (it seeams this tool is only good for muxen but not extracting)

do i really need another tool just to extract the pgs from the mkv?
luckily no, i found a program called subtitle edit http://www.nikse.dk/subtitleedit/ which can load the mkv with the pgs and does a quite good job with ocr.
with some manually work i finally got a perfect .srt from les blanks "the blues according to lighnin' hopkins" and can start to translate it.

[Chetwood]

and there comes the next problem, that tool won't load the mkv from makemkv.

Why don't you ask the coder on Doom9 to implement it? I was referring to its OCR capabilities. I also won't lose any sleep over you using any other tool.

[dark4181]

I'd much rather have MakeMKV spit the PGS or other subtitle out as a separate file, so it can be converted to whatever flavor of subtitle you like and then muxed in directly when you encode.

[Chetwood]

That has already been suggested but I haven't seen any reply by Mike yet.