Hi.
This is a subject that makes me mad. I mean, why the heck keep people embedding subtitles in video files?
The only reason I can find to explain it is that they are stupid. Well, things are as they are.
But I started to figure out how I could get rid of these.Because most of the time they are awful. Awful translation, awful timings, awful everything. And yet you must watch them there, ruining a good movie and a good experience.
This is how I finally got rid of them. I just wanted to share it with anyone interested. I know that opensubtitles.org is about the opposite thing, i.e. how to ADD. But you can't add before you remove. Well, in fact you could just put a new subtitle over the old one, but then they are often too hard to read. So, how can you remove the embedded subtitles? By the way, "embedded subtitles" are those that are hardcoded in the viideo. You can't hide them or edit them in any way since they are not text.
I don't know, maybe there is out there some tool to do this but I just don't know and since I am a DIY-person I just wrote a program to do it. But I didn't start from scratch. I based this on MPlayer, the player I use. It-s free software and has a lot of filters. One of these filters is called "delogo". as the name suggests it can be used to remove logos from the image that indicate the TV channel and the like. Well, they are not really removed since you can't recover the part of the image that's hidden by them. This filter just blurs the image so they are not visible.
So this is what I use. Why not use it to hide unwanted subtitles? This is what I did for some time. You have a rectangle blurring the image. But then, one day, I discovered, and this is the key to the whole thing, that you can direct the filter to change this shape and you can tell it when to do it. You just need to know the timings and the text. The right way to do this is OCR but I figured out some simpler method. Where can you find the text and timings? In a text file called SRT. So this is what you need to remove some embedded subtitles, just the same you need to add them. What my program does is simply convert the SRT in some simple format which is the input to the delogo filter.
I wrote it in ELISP. It should not be difficult to translate to another programming language. But for now this is what I have and what works for me. To run it you'll need a working copy of EMACS and the code I wrote.
The only drawback of this method is that you need to have the SRT that matches the embedded subtitles. My experience is that this is usually very easy to find but sometimes it is not available and then you have to tweak some SRT by hand.
If there is someone interested just let me know and I'll post the code and try to help.