I swear I do more than subtitles July 24, 2008

So today I spent awhile trying to translate subtitle files so that I could revisit old french class movies like “La Boum”. Unfortunately the subs “out there” are either in french or bland english. This sucks because La Boum was pretty funny when I saw it but when comparing some english subs found on the web to an old vhs rip the online subs werent as funny. So I was trying to make a hybrid version of the English based on the two different subtitles and my experience watching them. In the end I scrapped the project and may revisit it in the future.

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.