Quicktime Subtitle Converter

2006
http://www.ith-z.ch/check-it/index/home/
software/qtsubtitleconverter/QTSubtitleConverter.tar
software/qtsubtitleconverter/QTSubtitleConverter-src.tar

team: Brigit Lichtenegger

Unicode Subtitles Movie

For the Check It project we need to show subtitled movies that will display right on both Windows and Mac. Because the people doing the subtitling are not able to deliver Unicode Quicktime subtitles i wrote a little program to convert subtitles with Mac Roman or Windows 1252 character encoding to Unicode.

Unfortunately it is not possible to simply convert the entire quicktime text file to Unicode, as the headers need to be encoded in ASCII, so the QTSubtitleConverter reads text files encoded in Mac Roman or Windows 1252, and rewrites them so that the subtitles are encoded to unicode, and that a valid ASCII header is generated for each subtitle.
There is an additional problem displaying the subtitles with chroma key. In quicktime player the subtitle area will flash white and the subtitles are displayed until the next text is started when the area should really be painted transparent. As a dirty workaround the program can generate subtitles that contain a space character, so quicktime player is tricked into repainting the area correctly.

To see what all this looks like a Unicode subtitle movie is available as well as a MacRoman subtitle movie (the umlauts don't display right on a Windows machine), or open the Unicode text file or MacRoman text file in a text editor,

Screenshot Of QTSubtitleConverter

To run the QTSubtitleConverter you first need to make sure you have java (1.4+). Download QTSubtitleConverter.tar, extract it and doubleclick the .bat file if you're on windows, and the .command file if you're on Mac. Now you can convert either one file or multiple files at once, by choosing either a file or directory as input. In a one on one conversion you can specify the name of the file that will be generated. In a batch conversion the generated files will have the same name as the original input files, so make sure to specify the directory they should be written to.

Besides file naming, you should select the right character set used for the files to be converted, and optional you can specify wether subtitles containing a space should be generated.

The sources are available as they are.