TT subripper v

TT subripper
by Filiep Geeraert

Manual

I have reordered the manual a bit, splitting it up into an installation/setup part and an action part.
This is more logical, as you normally have to run the installation/configuration part only once.

A. Installation/configuration part
(overview)
a. vital utilities
1. Graphedit
2. TTSubripper
3. Autodvrconvert
4. DirectVobsub or Mediaplayer Classic

b. optional utilities/components
1. Cutter
2. Subripper
3. the font file "Lucida Teletext 83"
4. ConvertXtoDVD

c. optional components configuration
Mimicking the Teletext subtitles look

B. Conversion part
(overview)

(1. cutting the file with Cutter)
2. Graphedit
3. TTsubripper
(4. tuning TTsubripper)
5. Video conversion with AutoDVRconvert
(6. Subripper)
(7. ConvertXtoDVD)

A. Installation/configuration part

a. vital utilities
1. Graphedit
If Graphedit is not installed yet, download the program, install it and register the AX files (there is a batchfile that comes with it, called REGISTER.BAT with which you can do just that).

2. TTSubripper
Until someone else (maybe the guy who developed CCextractor will do so in the future, as I have given my source code to him) creates an alternative, you will need it.
Download it from the downloads page.
Unzip the file, and place the contents in a folder of choice.

3. AutoDVRconvert
You will need it to convert your videos to something else (MPEG2, MPEG4, DivX, etc.).
You can use another utility if you like, but just make sure it does not alter the timings, otherwise the subtitles will not be synchronised at all.
Simply download Autodvrconvert, and run the installer program to install it into a folder of choice.

4. DirectVOBsub or Media Player Classic
In order for the subtitles to show up during the play back of your video you need to install either of those 2 utilities :
Directvobsub or Mediaplayer Classic.
Both have their advantages and disadvantages.
Directvobsub will enable you to playback on almost any DirectX compatible Media player utility.
Mediaplayer Classic is an advanced light-weight media player, and consists of a single executable file.
So simply install the one you like and you're done.

b. optional utilities/components
1. Cutter
If you want to remove commercials or the padding at the beginning and/ord end of the video, you need a utility that will remove the cut parts, but also leave the TT data intact.
Videoredo, though it is a very nice product, in its current incarnation simply ditches the TT data, so you cannot use it for this purpose.
Cutter is a free utility that does preserve your data, even if the interface is not as easy to use as with Videoredo.
Simply run the instalation.

2. Subripper
If it turns out that after ripping the subtitles, they are out of sync, you can use this utility to simply add or subtract seconds or milliseconds from each subtitle.
Simply install the Subripper program into a folder of choice.

3. Lucida Teletext 83 font
If you would like to mimick the Teletext look from Mediacenter, with semi-transparent characters in a clearly legible font, such as I used on the screenshots, you will need to install this font.
Copy it (LUTTX83.TTF) from the C:\Windows\EHOME (assuming Windows is installed in C:\Windows) folder on your other PC to the PC you want to play the files on, and in Control Panel, Fonts, choose "Install new font" from the file menu.
Browse to the folder where you copied the file, and you should now have the Lucida Teletext 83 font available to your applications.

4. ConvertXtoDVD
This is a utility (not freeware unfortunately, but you download a trial version) that will easily accept an SRT file and burn it to a DVD as subtitles.
This is an excellent guide on how to convert a video file to a DVD, and including the subtitles with it.
Take into account that DVD's hardly support colour, so you will have to adapt your subtitles to make sure it remains clear who says what at all times.

c. optional components configuration
Mimicking the Teletext subtitles look

Although you can perfectly use the default look, it might be best to mimick the look Mediacenter uses when displaying Teletext subtitles.
Why ?
As TT extensively makes use of different colours for representing the different characters, several colours might be hard to read when the background can be any colour.
By making the background semi-transparent you can improve the readability a lot.
Also, the default Arial font might not be ideal for Teletext subtitles.
If you installed the Lucida Teletext 83 font as shown in the previous steps, you almost have your work done.

a. with DirectVOBsub
If you chose DirectVOBsub as your preference, then you will need to configure that program.
The configuration is only visible however, when you play back a video with an associated SRT file.
So in Windows Mediaplayer open an MPEG2 or DivX file for which you have a subtitle in SRT format (or create a blank SRT file with the same name as the MPG file).
As soon as the video starts playing, at the bottom right corner of your screen, you should see a green arrow
Double click on it to get to the subtitle configuration.
You should now get a screen similar to this one :

Click the button below "Text settings" to choose your font and its settings.

If you set everything the same way as you see in the screenshot above, you should get the same look as in my screenshots.
The font size is a personal thing, the ideal size will depend on your screen resolution (my laptop has 16, whereas my TV running at 720p is set to a size 20).

b. with Media Player Classic
Start up Media Player Classic.
Go to View, Options.

Click on Playback, output and change the settings as in the screenshot below, to make sure that subtitles can actually be displayed.

Click on Subtitles, Default style, and change the settings like in the screenshot.
You should get similar subtitles as in the screenshots I posted, from now on.

B. Conversion part
(overview) (optional parts are between brackets)

(1. cutting the file with Cutter)
2. Graphedit
3. TTsubripper
(4. tuning TTsubripper)
(5. Subripper)
(6. ConvertXtoDVD)

1. Cutting the video.
You only need to do this if your video contains commercials or other parts you want to cut out.
It is very important to know that if you intend to do this, you must do it at the very beginning.
Once you convert your video to another format (MPEG2, DivX, Xvid, ...) all subtitle data will be lost.
Also it is paramount that you use a utility (Cutter works for sure) that does not lose the Teletext info, or there will not be any Teletext data to look for.
Once you have cut out all the things you do not need in your file, you are ready for the next step.

2. Running Graphedit.
Start up Graphedit.
From the File menu, choose Render Media File, and open the DVR-MS file you want to get the subtitles from.
It will pop up a warning message that it could not render some streams.
This indeed refers to the Teletext data.
Now remove everything, except for the Decrypt/Tag box and your DVR-MS file.
You can do this by clicking on a box and then pushing the delete button on your keyboard.
Now connect pin 2 from the DVR-MS file to the Decrypt/Tag box, by clicking on DVR-out-2 and dragging the line to the Input pin of the decrypt/tag component.
In the Graph menu, click Insert Filters, and go to the Directshow Filters list, where you select the Dump filter.
The program will now ask you for a location, call the file DUMP.FIL as TTsubripper looks for this specific name.
For the location of the file, choose the folder you installed the TTsubripper program in.
You should now have a graph that is similar to this one :

Now hit the green play button, and wait for a while.
First the green button will turn to grey, and once the conversion has finished (might take a couple of minutes), it will turn to green again.
The DUMP.FIL data will now have been created in the location you specified.
This is the raw Teletext data, which still needs to be decoded.

3. Now we 're ready for the real work.
Open a command prompt and go to the folder you installed the program in (CD \<installation folder>)
Make sure the DUMP.FIL file is in the same location.
From a command prompt, run the TTSUBRIPPER program, by simply typing : TTSUBRIPPER.
It will now perform several phases.
The whole process only takes a couple of minutes.
However, during this process your CPU might easily go to 100%, so only run this while you are not recording a show.
The result should be four files in the same folder : "Subtitles.SRT", "Subtitles without colours.SRT", "Subtitles.HTM" and DUMP.DEC.
The first file, "Subtitles.srt" contains all the subtitles, together with the times they are to be played, and the colours they should appear in.
If you copy this file to the folder where your video is in, and you convert the video to MPEG2 or Divx, etc., and then rename your SRT file to the same name as your video, but with an SRT extension, DirectVobsub or Media Player Classic will automatically play the subtitles together with the video.
The second file, "Subtitles without colours.srt" is meant to be used if you want to burn a DVD that contains the subtitles.
DVD's do not support coloured subtitles, so you will need a white-only variant, and this is it.
Subtitles.HTM is an HTML file you can open in your browser, that gives you an impression of how the subtitles will appear on screen.
It can be very useful as a reference if you want to burn a DVD with the subtitles and you want to make sure that it remains clear at all times who said what.
You might then change the subtitles a bit (for example, add "-" when speakers change).
Finally, DUMP.DEC is the decode Teletext data, that is, ALL of it.
Some people might find it useful to have a look at it, maybe write their own utility to extract data from it, whatever.
You can of course delete any file you do not need for the purpose you want to use my utility.

4. Finetuning TTsubripper.
This is an optional step, but I recommend you have a look at it anyway, as you can solve some problems with it.
Some problems you might encounter and how to work around them :

Problem :
1) Special characters such as ß, ñ, à, etc. are not shown correctly in the output file.
Reason : you have not specified a codepage, or you chose the wrong one.
TTSubripper cannot automatically detect the correct codepage.
Use the parameter :

-l=xx

where xx stands for the language.
xx may be : de / en / fr / es / pt / it
which stands for Deutsch (German), English, Français (French), español (Spanish), portugués (Portugese), italiano (Italian).

2) Subtitles are shown twice.
This might happen if the TV station broadcasts every line twice over the same codepage (VTM for instance).
You can avoid this by choosing the -half option, which will discard every other subtitle.
It might also happen if you have a TV station that broadcasts subtitles on 2 separate TT pages (RTBf La Une, for instance).
You will need to find out which pages are being used, which you can do by browsing Teletext live, and looking at the information of that station.
Once you know which pages are being used, you can use the -i=xyz parameter to ignore a certain page.

3) Some subtitles are not shown at all.
This will happen if you have subtitles that last less than a second.
As I am using the Teletext clock to get my timings, by default every subtitle has ,000 for the thousands part.
Now if the subtitle finishes within the second, the begin and end time will be exactly the same and the subtitle will not be shown.
The way to work around this is to use the -min=xyz parameter.
This is the number of milliseconds (1-999) that the total of all subtitles that occur within a one second interval will be shown.
So if you have 5 very brief subtitles that show up within a second, and you use the -min=500 parameter those 5 subtitles will all be shown during 100 milliseconds.
If during another second you only have 2 subtitles, each will be awarded 250 ms playtime.

5. Now that you have the Teletext subtitles, you can convert your video to a different format.
Use any tool you like, but make sure that the tool does not alter the length of the recording.
If the recording is eg. 3 seconds shorter after the conversion, then the subs will be out of sync.
A tool that seems to work just fine for this is Autodvrconvert.
Start up AutoDVRconvert, and choose the destination folder to the one you like.
Next, click on the "Convert Single File" button.

Once you have chosen your file, the conversion will take place.
It might take a couple of minutes before it is finished.

OK, so now you have a DivX / WMV / MPEG2... file and an SRT file.
All you need to do now is place the two together in one folder.
Rename the SRT so that apart from the extension it bears the same name as the videofile, for example :

"The Deer Hunter.AVI", and "The Deer Hunter.SRT".

6. Subripper
We now have both the subtitles and a file in MPEG2/MPEG4/DivX, XVid, etc. format.
At this point in time it is best to check that the synchronisation between the movie and the subtitles is OK.
Play the file in Windows Media Player Classic or in another Media player if you installed DirectVOBsub.
If you notice that subtitles play noticeably too early or too late, you can rectify this by running Subripper.

Close the video file.
Go to the folder where you installed Subripper.
Start the program and click on the third button from the left.

Another window will now open, in this window, click the File, Open menu

Now browse to the SRT file you created and open it.
You should see the contents of the subtitle file.
Now click the 2nd button (the one with the clock on it) on the lower toolbar.

Now, in the time correction field, you can add hours, minutes, seconds, or milliseconds, or subtract them by ticking the "minus" box.
Just enter the number of milliseconds you would like to add or subtract, and then click the "Correct time" button.
The times will be corrected at blazing speed, and you can then save your file again.
Open the video again in your mediaplayer, and check if things are better now, if not, repeat the above steps until he two are more or less synchronised.

7. ConvertXtoDVD
As said before, I will not treat this subject here, as it is too lengthy.
You should just remember that it is possible to burn the subtitles to a DVD with this program.
Also, that you should start with the "Subtitles without colour.SRT" file, as DVD's do not support coloured subtitles anyway.
You can use the SUBTITLES.HTM to see how the subtitles appeared on Teletext, and then make certain changes on your subtitles to make sure it remains clear who said what.