Subtitles only for non-English parts?

[Flippit]

I am so glad to have found this site - I was trying to watch a DivX version of Syriana, without subtitles. (There is a lot of Farsi spoken in the movie) I was able to watch my movie (using subtitles from this site and VLC to render them), but I find subtitles very distracting when English is being spoken!

Is there any way to get hold of subtitles that only appear when a language other than English is spoken? Or, if not, how do I modify existing subtitles to do this?

Thanks!

[giannid]

Hard subs are subtitles that are burned into the film for the foreign dialog parts. So, you should look for the english hard subs if they exist.

[ixquic]

Hardsubs are generally a bad idea, because they cover part of the picture in a destructive way, and they're virtually not extractable, editable or removable. (SubRip has an option to extract hardsubs but it's still in a very early stage, it's easier to copy them by hand.)

Also hardsubs could be anything, there's no guarantee that they're only for the foreign-language parts.

If you find vobsubs for the movie (bitmapped subtitles that come as *.idx + *.sub, or *.idx + *.rar, around 1-3 MiB big), chances are that they have two English tracks, and one of them contains only the so-called forced subtitles from the DVD. These are generally for the foreign-language parts only.

There should be more fields for tagging subtitles on opensubtitles. In addition to forced, there's also things like: with song lyrics/karaoke, Hearing Impaired (aka captions, with sounds and some speakers' names), automatic translation, etc. It's hard to find them if the only way to tag a subtitle file is the comments field.