Is there a simple way to view the content of PGS subtitles?

[RasterEyes]

I don't mean viewing the subtitles while playing a video, because I don't want to have to know ahead of time when subtitles appear.

I'm particularly interesting in seeing if a subtitle track contains foreign language translations, what they are, and when they appear.

I realize the subtitles are graphical, not just raw text characters. I'm absolutely sure that many years ago I used some piece of software to peek into the contents of subtitle tracks, but I can't remember what software I was using. Each subtitle in a subtitle stream is essentially a time, a duration, a graphic image to be overlaid on top of the video, and I believe some positioning information.

When I google this subject all I find in discussion of turning on subtitles during video playback, moving subtitle tracks from one file to another, translating them into different formats like SRT, etc. I see that I can use MKVCleaver to extract subtitle tracjs into separate files, and perhaps that's a necessary first step if I can't find software that works directly with an MKV file to view the subtitles contained within it.

[Sunoo]

Use Subtitle Edit.

[Radiocomms237]

Absolutely agree 100%, you won't find much that SubtitleEdit can't do.

See the Github page here: https://github.com/SubtitleEdit

You don't have to bother going through the whole OCR conversion-to-text if you just want to see the subtitles and timecodes either.

I use a different program (Inviska MKVExtract) to extract tracks from a MKV file but the procedure is the same. I do this for pretty much every MKV file I rip, just to confirm that I've labelled all the tracks correctly. I also use it to extract DTS Express audio tracks so I can convert them to AC3 (a lot of players won't play DTS Ex).

The other app I couldn't do without here is "Google Translate" on my smartphone, I just set it to "Detect Language", tap "Camera", point it at the computer screen and it not only translates the on-screen text but tells me what language it is (very handy for identifying commentary subtitle tracks in foreign languages and the like).

[Radiocomms237]

I forgot to add one very handy tip...

Once you drag'n'drop the subtitle file into SubtitleEdit and it pops up on screen, scroll all the way to the last entry. A lot of the time it will identify the file (in English), for example it might say "German SDH", or "Traditional Mandarin".

Almost all Universal releases have this last line, but I'd say it's there more often than not in most other files I look at too.

[RasterEyes]

Use Subtitle Edit.

I didn't realize until now that Subtitle Edit could directly open an MKV file. That helps. Thanks!

In some case, however, I imagine it would faster to extract all of the subtitle tracks with MKVCleaver first, so Subtitle Edit doesn't have to go through the extract process itself for each subtitle you open.

[Sunoo]

It loads subsequent subtitle tracks faster, so it must cache something.

[Yoshitaka]

I'm looking for something that can split a dual line subtitle file with chinese and english in one pgs. Often with films from china they include chinese and english subs so that they're shown at the same time.. I'd like to be able to just extract the english portion of the subtitle. I don't think subtitle edit can handle this for me..?
I can use M$ Word to remove all the Chinese if I had it as entirely text first.. Then I can copy and paste into subtitle edit to and save as .srt

[Radiocomms237]

I've never seen a subtitle file like that.

If you could you extract an example from an .mkv and upload it to a cloud somewhere, I'll take a look and see if I can figure it out?

[dcoke22]

Has someone already made a single language subtitle for it on one of the subtitle downloading sites?

[Radiocomms237]

Thinking more about this, obviously it would be difficult to "split" the two languages as an image-based subtitle file because both lines/languages would appear on each image.

I say "difficult", but not impossible... Within SubtitleEdit, you can go to:

File > Import > Blu-ray (.sup) subtitle file for edit...

Browse to and open the extracted .sup image file, then you have the option to "Export image" for each line, then you could do a quick edit with Photoshop (or your program of choice) to erase the Chinese content, then "Import image" again with only the English content.

That should be doable, but extremely time consuming. Say 30 seconds per image, times say 1,200 lines, that's 10 hours straight (without stopping)!

It would be much quicker to 'OCR' it with SubtitleEdit to get the text, but I'm wondering what would happen if you had only the English dictionary active, would it not be able to recognize and therefore remove the Chinese characters?