Saturday, August 01, 2009

View a movie on PS3 with decent Subtitle

Most of the method I found when I search for "AVCHD Subtitle .sub" which point me to either mkv2vob or tsMuxer. Most of them refer to text base subtitle (.srt) file which is good for English base subtitle. But for me I'm Thai. If possible, I would love to have the method that works for picture-base Thai subtitle. Don't ask why I am not converting this file to text base subtitle, there is no free good Thai OCR available to do that (yet).

And at last I found it. With the following toolchain you can create an AVCHD content to be played on PS3 with subtitle on/off capability, using picture-base subtitle taken from Bluray disc!
  • BDSup2Sub - Use this tool to convert .sub and .idx distributed in the Internet back to PGS .sup file (BD subtitle). Don't forget to change the resolution. I think it should be possible too to take this from a BD movie directly (but I rarely found anyone distribute subtitle file in .sup format, since .sub works well computer-base player like VLC or Media Player Classic).
  • tsMuxer - As with normal AVCHD creation, use tsMuxer to mux MKV video and audio stream, then select add and add .sup subtitle file created above. If you have a compatible MKV (H264+(AC3 or DTS)), the conversion takes only about 5-10 minutes. I would recommend writing directly to your external hard drive where you will use to plug to PS3, since speed here depend mostly on hard drive speed.
  • AVCHDMe - After the the creation of AVCHD, use AVCHDMe to make sure that the created AVCHD is playable on PS3. Mostly this only concern 8.3 file name, so I guess just renaming the file manually may work.
With this, I can view HD content with decent translation on screen. The only problem I face is that the movie has been pushed back up to top of screen, leaving a blank black panel on the bottom (instead of black panel on both top and bottom). Other than that, everything seems fine.