Subtitle Ripping Guide for DivX MPEG-4 v1.0

 

Okay, I thought it would be nice to create a tutorial on how to rip subtitles from a DVD. I think people 
are shying away from doing this merely because it sounds difficult. So let me tell you now that it is 
laughingly easy to do! You can even make your own subtitles, but for now let's just stick to taking 
what already exists. 

But why bother getting subtitles? Why not?! Subtitles take practically no memory on the Divx! In a two 
hour movie such as my following example 'The Mummy' DVD to Divx Rip, the whole of the subtitles 
will take a micro sized 50KB of extra space! I have never come across a Divx CD that didn't have 
many many times that space left on the CD after the film has finished. Also, its rather cool to be able 
to show your friends the Divx you made that has the option of subtitles. 

On the down side, there are only two DivX Player I know of that will play subtitles (MicroDVD and 
DivX MPEG-4 Player)- and this guide only deals with one of them : it is the excellent 'DivX player 
0.01 (or above)' by REDZ (mailto:%20divxplayer@hotmail.com) please show him your thanks =o). To 
use it in MicroDVD shouldn't be too hard either, so no additional instructions are provided (refer to the 
MicroDVD readme/guide for more information). Now on to the conversion, I am going to make a Divx 
with subtitles of The Mummy:  

Programs you will need 

• 

MS Wordpad (or any word processor)  

• 

SubRip (v0.7b or above)  

• 

SubRip Converter (0.4b or above)  

• 

DVD Ripping Tool  

Rip the VOB files from the film to your Hard Disk. Open subrip and select: File > Open Vob 

 

Up will pop the selection dialogue box seen below. Under the red Action heading choose the 
SubPictures to text via OCR. Click on the Open Dir. Button and find the first Vob that you Ripped 
from the DVD. Put a tick alongside the VOB files you want to rip the text from.Once you have 
selected the Vob file that contains the subtitles, you are ready to go. Make sure the Vob file is the one 
with the film on it and not something else on the DVD. Click Start. 

Note: DVD's use actual picture files for their subtitles. This means that the computer has to use 
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to convert the picture to a text file.  

 

The following window will appear next to make sure the picture is clear. If the text looks white on a 
black background click the OK button. If not, change the 'color 3' box (or whatever it is called) to 
another number, or you could try the auto detect button. When it looks correct click the OK button. 

 

If you are running the program for the first time the computer must learn the letters. Be patient and 
answer its questions by typing in the correct letter as it asks. It is important not to put in the wrong 
letter and also to make sure that the capital and lower case letters are the correct. Don't worry, the 
reading process will get faster as you go along. After the first 30 or more letters the computer will 
almost completely take over. 

 

The text that the computer has read is shown in a white box below. The picture that the DVD uses is 
shown above it. If you cannot see the white Subtitles box, click the 'show subtitles text windows' to 
see it. Now, sit back and wait until the whole file is ripped. 

 

Now the computer has learned what the text looks like you can save this information to a file for 
future use. This is a good feature because you do not need to tell the computer what certain letters 
are every time you use it. To save this information, go to Characters Matrix > Save Characters Matrix. 

 

When you choose your next Vob file to rip, you can go to Characters Matrix > Open Characters 
Matrix and load this information once again ie. 

 

Now the important thing to do is save the text you just ripped. Go to the white Subtitles window and 
select File > Save as.  

 

Note: The processed text is literally nothing more than a text file even though it may have the 
extension .srt or .sub or whatever. 

Continue to do this for every Vob file you rip and you will have about five text files each with subtitles 
on them. If you were to open them in wordpad they would look something like this: 

 

MicroDVD can read the SubRip format, but you won't be able to use MicroDVD's more advanced 
features like setting font face, size, position, color for each subtitle line seperately. So it is preferable 
to convert this to MicroDVD's native subtitle format first. To do this, open 'SubRip Converter'. In the 
frame rate box select 25 if you use a PAL CD and 29.7 if you use NTSC. Select the input file ie. the 
one you just ripped. And the output file ie. where you want to save the converted text. Once done 
click the Convert button. 

 

The finished file will have a .txt extension unless you change it to something else. The converted file 
will look like this: 

 

Ignore the bracketed numbers as they tell the Divx or MicroDVD player when to put the text up. Next 
you want all of your text files made into one single file. So open the first of the text files you have 
converted in Wordpad (or another word processor). Then open Wordpad again and then open the 
next converted file in that. Copy the text from the second text file and paste it into the first. Do the 
same again for each text file until you have just one single text file with the text of the movie in it. 

Relax, we are nearly done ;) You can now open the text in any word processor such as Microsoft 
Word and spell check it. Once you are happy with the finished file save it with the SAME name as the 
Divx movie and use the extension .sub. I called my Divx movie: 'mummy.avi' because it was a DVD 
rip of the film 'The Mummy'. So to save the subtitles text I will save the file as: "mummy.sub". Please 
include the quotation marks (" ") to force the word processor to save it with the .sub extension 
otherwise it will save it as something like mummy.sub.txt or mummy.sub.doc! 

Thats it! Save both the text file and the AVI file on the same CD and you are finished. Open the CD in 
Divx Player and it will tell you that subtitles have been found. You can choose the font you want and 
the color too. Here is how the finished Divx looks, cool huh! 

 

Not a bad Divx rip even if I say so myself =): 

• 

TITLE : The Mummy  

• 

SUBTITLES : Yes  

• 

CODEC : Divx 3.11 alpha (Low Motion)  

• 

VIDEO : 650kbits  

• 

AUDIO : MP3 96kbits 48khz  

• 

RUNNING TIME : 120 minutes