Just a question, is there any tool (and I don't know about it) for the bad timing subtitles

[Cyberyoda1411]

I don't want to talk about 'issues', just to ask something, because it is the best place for it. Is there any way to deal with the totally wrong timing subtitle, where you must go through the whole video to correct it? Is there any tool that can 'guess' the title and the audio? Or some technique of work to make this job easier? It is not a problem when the timing is just shifted for a fraction of a second, you can set the start point and offset the rest. But, when the timing is totally inconsistent, it is pretty hard to shift some lines to the left, because all tools are directed to the shifting to the right.

Any suggestion would be nice. When you have some totally inconsistent timing, you literally must go through the whole video, from the start to the end, and it is very tiring. I don't need to say that is a spoiler, if you want to watch this later.

[diomed]

are you aware of setting different frames per second?

because usually that fixes it. when subtitles match fps of movie.

[diomed]

the tool for the job is your hands and your eyes and your brain no tool can ever do what you want..unless we get ai in the future that is smart enough to be scared of

AI works on training. So someone needs to train it to do that.

you dont have to be scared of anything so silly.

[darnn]

Theoretically speaking, if you have subtitles without timecodes at all, you could use WhisperX or Whisper-TimeStamped (though I have less experience with that one). You'll get a more-or-less decent transcript, but, importantly, fairly accurate timing. Then you could improve that, and match to the accurate text without timecodes that you have. But this is, admittedly, a lot of work as well. Just less than doing it by hand from scratch. Also, WhisperX uses something called wav2vec, you might want to look into that as well, and into the concept of "forced alignment" in general.

[Cyberyoda1411]

Diomed, I know that every discrepancy between a video and its subtitle is based on fps. Do you have any experience with that? Can we really fix the problem with the different fps? And how can we hit the right one? I think the standard is 24fps. How do you know which should do the work? 23 or 25? Is it som tedious guess?

[diomed]

I'm using PotPlayer. Upon right click on context menu, on Playback/System information amongst other details there is Actual FPS of video file.

In general FPS will mostly be 23.97 But if it's not, then you have to see which framerate your video file has, and set it up via Subtitle Edit accordingly.

If you ever downloaded subtitles from addic7ed or similar pages you'd see they in fact offer list of same files that vary with release. and they do that mostly because release is ripped in diffferent frame rate.

[Cyberyoda1411]

@Diomed You can see the fps of every possible video. Go to the video file, right-click/properties/details/section Video/Frame rate.

But what we can do? How can we know what is the new fps? I read the fps of the video, then I use that for the subtitle and I get nothing. If there is some bad timing, it will be there to stay.

[diomed]

if whole title is shifted, it has invalid fps. then you need to go to Synchronisation - Change framerate and select framerate that matches with video.

Or it just maybe needs to be moved 10-15 seconds forward or backwards.

Its a trial and error thing, but with pretty quick result.

If nothing of those 2 works, then you certainly have a deeper problem that needs fixing. Meaning whole subtitle is basically screwed up. I mean, it's not usually the subtitle that's screwed up, but fact that original file for which was made is no longer available to find.

But in final, it's usually better to have some subtitle, than none.

[GrampaWildWilly]

You can see the fps of every possible video. Go to the video file, right-click/properties/details/section Video/Frame rate.

I don't think I can contribute anything concrete to help solve this problem. But this statement is not entirely correct, at least, not if you're talking about Windows. The frame rate shown in the file properties is not always correct. For example, if the real frame rate is 23.98, Windows will tell you 23. Similarly, 29.98 is reported by Windows as 29. Windows doesn't even round the number up or down. It just truncates it to the integer portion of the value. If the frame rate is exactly 25 or 30, of course Windows gets those right. The only 2 ways I know to get the real frame rate of a video are either to get an ffprobe report on it or to look in the Media Information in VLC while the video is playing. VLC will give the value to more than 2 decimal places. Maybe SE also tells you the correct value but I'm not sure about that because I don't use SE for the kind of extensive things you guys are talking about.

[diomed]

well i never watch for frame rate in SE, always in actual video player, and I also have little free program called MediaInfo which you can check out, that displays that info, amongst many others, of video files.

[uckthis]

[Cyberyoda1411]

@uckthis, thanks for the information. I don't know if this will help to get some order in the messy subtitles timings, but it is nice to have that information about fps in the main screen.

[uckthis]

@Cyberyoda1411 Use Youtube Studio.