XiaoXi Posted May 23, 2015 at 01:15 AM Report Share Posted May 23, 2015 at 01:15 AM This seems quite inexplicable to me. All Chinese TV shows and movies that you watch online have Chinese subtitles, and all western TV shows and movies that you watch on Chinese TV channel websites have Chinese subtitles. Everything has Chinese subtitles made for it basically. But if you go to a Chinese subtitle file download website you can find subtitles for: Chinese movies, Western movies and Western TV shows.......but not even one subtitle for ANY Chinese TV shows...... Why?? So weird and so frustrating. Just doesn't make any sense. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
imron Posted May 23, 2015 at 03:11 AM Report Share Posted May 23, 2015 at 03:11 AM but not even one subtitle for ANY Chinese TV shows Wrong! There is at least one, but it's the only one I've ever seen. As luck would have it, it's for one of the better TV shows that has ever appeared on Chinese TV. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AdamD Posted May 23, 2015 at 05:55 AM Report Share Posted May 23, 2015 at 05:55 AM I don't know whether this addresses your question directly (edit: it doesn't, cheers imron for clarifying), but China has been shutting down subtitle sites. It's been attributed variously to anti-piracy campaigns, pressure from online competition and mass censorship. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
imron Posted May 23, 2015 at 07:59 AM Report Share Posted May 23, 2015 at 07:59 AM I don't think it's relevant as most of those are for western films. Even back when such sites were going strong they didn't have soft-subs for Chinese TV shows. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HerrPetersen Posted May 23, 2015 at 01:01 PM Report Share Posted May 23, 2015 at 01:01 PM I recently was looking into extracting subtitles via OCR to later use them with a programm such as subs2srs. However I decided that the process was too time-involving and probably still too error-prone. The whole situation really feels stupid as somebody has already typed the subtitles. The program "subtitle edit" looks promising. However I did not manage to get it running and in the following demo-video only english-subs are ocr-ed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJvU6WOBMkQ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
XiaoXi Posted May 24, 2015 at 11:59 AM Author Report Share Posted May 24, 2015 at 11:59 AM Quote but not even one subtitle for ANY Chinese TV shows Wrong! There is at least one, but it's the only one I've ever seen. As luck would have it, it's for one of the better TV shows that has ever appeared on Chinese TV. That appears to just be a transcript and not subtitles? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
imron Posted May 24, 2015 at 01:12 PM Report Share Posted May 24, 2015 at 01:12 PM Ah yes, correct you are. Well, I guess your original statement was true then. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
XiaoXi Posted May 24, 2015 at 02:30 PM Author Report Share Posted May 24, 2015 at 02:30 PM I recently was looking into extracting subtitles via OCR to later use them with a programm such as subs2srs. However I decided that the process was too time-involving and probably still too error-prone. The whole situation really feels stupid as somebody has already typed the subtitles. The program "subtitle edit" looks promising. However I did not manage to get it running and in the following demo-video only english-subs are ocr-ed. Yes it wouldn't work well at all and as you say it seems pointless when its obviously already been done for every single series. What would be possible is to use subtitle edit on vobsubs from DVDs. If you get a DVD version of a tv series in China then they will have subtitles and as they are stored on a separate vobsub file it makes the process a whole lot more feasible. It still requires going through every line though since the software will have trouble with some characters for some reason - even though they appear completely clear to me. The thing is, if you're into learning Japanese at all then you'll have no doubt noticed the forum where they have subtitles for every single Japanese drama out there. The forum members all do it themselves. Why don't we have anything like that here? What's more is what they are doing is a hundred times harder, they have no vobsub possibilties and no subtitles to go by at all. They simply have to do it all by listening as far as I can tell. If we were to do it it'd either be a case of simply copying down all the subtitles as you see them, or trying something like I say with subtitle edit on DVDs. Why can't we arrange some kind of group effort to start subtitling shows? Or maybe we're just more lazy on the whole than Japanese learners! 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
etm001 Posted May 25, 2015 at 05:07 AM Report Share Posted May 25, 2015 at 05:07 AM I submitted an enhancement request to Pleco last year for subtitle reading functionality. I'd pay good money for it. One can only hope... 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
XiaoXi Posted May 28, 2015 at 01:59 AM Author Report Share Posted May 28, 2015 at 01:59 AM But that would mean Pleco would be able to play video too would it not? It would certainly be a big change. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
etm001 Posted May 28, 2015 at 02:22 AM Report Share Posted May 28, 2015 at 02:22 AM But that would mean Pleco would be able to play video too would it not? It would certainly be a big change. Yes, ultimate functionality would be to play the video in Pleco and be able to tap subtitles to look up word meanings. However, I did suggest non-video playback solution as well: at a bare minimum, even functionality that would allow me to load a subtitle file in Pleco and navigate the file by timecode would be nice (navigation controls can include scrolling within the file; jumping to a specific time; or skipping forwards/backwards by time intervals (i.e., like what a lot of podcast players allow you to do). In this way I can quickly jump to a specific point in the file and look up the words that I'm seeing in the video. This solution helps when you are watching a video on your laptop/TV and want to look up a definition quickly in Pleco. Even better, if you have a tablet that provides split-screen functionality, you could have both the video player and Pleco open at the same time. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
XiaoXi Posted May 29, 2015 at 02:35 AM Author Report Share Posted May 29, 2015 at 02:35 AM Loading a subtitle file in? What subtitle files would they be then? This whole thread is about the fact there aren't any for TV shows. You could load in ones for movies like you say and scroll through them but its pretty boring. Its not anything missing from Pleco, its the subtitle files themselves. Your last solution would again be great if subtitle files actually existed.... Is nobody honestly interested in getting together and transcribing subtitles? I'm familiar with aegisub so I could make the transcriptions into actual working subtitles but I'd need more people transcribing to get it all done. It certainly would be a lot easier than what they're doing over at the Japanese forums by listening alone. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
etm001 Posted May 29, 2015 at 03:52 AM Report Share Posted May 29, 2015 at 03:52 AM Loading a subtitle file in? What subtitle files would they be then? You already answered this question yourself: What would be possible is to use subtitle edit on vobsubs from DVDs. If you get a DVD version of a tv series in China then they will have subtitles and as they are stored on a separate vobsub file it makes the process a whole lot more feasible. The best source for subtitles is from DVDs. Absent that, the best method for generating them would be to use OCR to extract them from a video file. It would be great if Pleco offered this functionality. Here's Mike Love's response to my original enhancement request: This one's been simmering for a while, actually - would be pretty involved, so I think we have to finish a couple of other long-awaited things (flashcards + OCR improvements, mostly) before we can think about it, but it's definitely on our to-do list. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
XiaoXi Posted May 30, 2015 at 02:51 AM Author Report Share Posted May 30, 2015 at 02:51 AM I certainly didn't answer that question myself because that process is still not easy, especially alone, and as yet nobody has offered to help extracting and editing subtitles. Therefore the subtitles do not exist. Like I said several times now, we need something like they have on the Japanese drama forums where they all team together creating subs. Until we start doing that, subtitles like I said do not exist. Movie subtitles exist but movies are few and far between - especially good ones. The good ones are pretty much all period dramas anyway so you're very limited in choice when compared with the tv series. Unless you want to watch Hong Kong ones but then you need to find the mandarin version and you'll find the mandarin subtitles aren't saying the exact same words as the mandarin dubbing. I think the team at Pleco won't be too quick to add that feature until the subtitles actually exist in the first place. This kind of software seems to already exist for Japanese since the subtitles exist. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
prophecy Posted June 12, 2015 at 04:07 PM Report Share Posted June 12, 2015 at 04:07 PM I tried doing this before, extracting hardsubs from videos. I literally spent days trying to solve the problem with limited success. I eventually got an extraction process working but the end result wasn't good, maybe 90-95% of words of came out. This sounds ok, but it's really not when you consider how much dialogue can be missing in that 5-10%. You'd be surprised how hard it is to separate the subtitles from the video, even by eye sometimes it blends in to the background. In the end I gave up cause it was wasting my precious study time. Oddly enough, I found this topic googling for information because I thought I'd have another crack at it. For this series that I'm about to start watching I found videos like this with the subtitles nicely separated (perfect for OCR) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmU2Ay_3PPo although honestly it seems like a pain seeing as I'd have to download it twice, once for the subs, and once for a decent video with decent audio. If anyone want's to do it though, this would be perfect to OCR. I also bought a shit ton of DVDs before I left China. Problem with the perfectly legitimate street vendor sold DVDs was they all had hardsubs too. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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