More frustration with video files July 22, 2008

So today I continued my battle with video files and soft subtitles. I have no idea why apple hasnt posted any information about this feature. It is so useful, yet not widely used or documented. I have checked to make sure its not an error on my part. The subs display on iTunes, quicktime, and on the ipod classic. Why no iPhone love? A couple ideas:Maybe the iPhone’s new 2.0 software reads this yet used feature differently. Maybe it’s my iphone’s firmware file. Maybe it’s the fact that muxo is flawed and I’ll have to learn how to add the subs manually to get damn subs on this French movie. Whatever my answer is it should not be this hard.

[UPDATE]

I have succesfully managed to get my subs working! Just needed to do some problem solving to narrow my problem down to the subrip file (.srt). Here’s a screenchot from a test video I made with a sample clip and sample subs i made to find out that my original subs were bad.

Late Night of Frustration July 22, 2008

Tonight I have had two goals: Get “La Boum” (a french class favorite) and “Tell No One” (also in french, but I forgot the french title) onto my computer. The problem with foreign films are the subtitles. Basically I converted a split movie in two parts to one movie in iPhone format (.mp4). Now joining the two movies together isnt a big deal, but getting the subs right is another story. Basically I had to hunt down programs that’ll join subs (only could find windows prog’s…yay for the parallels) and found a couple apps that would do the trick. However then I had to deal with framerates and the imported framerate and the exported framerate and that was a real hassle. Once I finally got the subs done with each app to see if they were different I loaded up the movie with the subs via a program for the mac called “Muxo”. Muxo is an app that was most likely thrown together because its pretty buggy, but if you know what youre doing does the trick. After loading the movie in iTunes I then proceeded to play it only to find out that  my macbook pro would crash due to mismatched framerates. So now I have to reencode the movie all over again because muxo wont let me take out the bad subtitles (i said it was buggy) so I’m awake and complaining. One of the cooler benefits of tonight is finding out about wordpress.