subtips3 (SUBTItles for PS3)

a tool to create videos with subtitles compatible with playstation 3

Sony's Playstation 3 embeds a video player that supports subtitles, as long as they are embedded in the video file in the form of a xsub stream: side-car subtitle files such as srt files are not supported. Also, video containers that support embedded subtitles in the form of text such as mkv files are not supported either by Playstation 3 media player.

One solution to get subtitles on video files is to 'burn' them into the video: the subtitles become part of the images. As a result, the media player doesn't even know that the video file contains subtitles. This solution is not great as:

• it's impossible to turn off subtitles (or even to remove them, as they are hardcoded into the video frames)
• as the media player has no way to know that there are subtitles
  • Playstation 3 media player's subtitle menu is disabled (greyed out)
  • the file doesn't contain subtitle metadata, which prevents media players from using it for searches (eg list all video files that have japanese subtitles)
• it's impossible to add more than one subtitle track (for example for multiple languages) on the same file

So, the most suitable solution for Playstation 3 media server is to embed subtitles as an xsub stream. Unfortunately, this has quite a fair amount of drawbacks too:

1. xsub streams are not always supported by popular media players (at the time of writing, vlc player doesn't handle them; mplayer is supposed to support them but there seems to be a bug that causes them to not display)
2. because xsub streams store subtitles as bitmaps that get overlaid on the image:
   • their storage is far from efficient compared to text-based subtitles such as srt files
   • the resolution, size, color or font of the subtitles can't be changed by the viewer. This often results in ugly, hard-to-read subtitles when a low resolution movie is viewed on a high resolution device.

The goal of subtips3 is to create a Playstation 3-friendly video file from a video file and one or more subtitle files in popular format (eg srt files). The playsyation 3-friendly video file can then be played on Playstation 3 media player, regardless it is stored on a local drive or streamed from a pnp media server.

Note: this tool can also be used simply to encode a non PS3 compatible video file (eg mkv container, or codecs unsupported by Playstation 3) into a PS3-compatible one.

Note: this tool requires that ffmpeg command line ([https://www.ffmpeg.org/]) is installed and in the current path.

usage

the following command line creates the Playstation 3 compatible video ~/Videos/myps3vidwithsubs.avi from the video ~/Videos/myvideo.mp4 and the vobsub subtitle ~/myvideo.fre.idx (also implicitely requires ~/myvideo.fre.sub, which is the other file of the idx/sub pair that constitutes a vobsub subtitle) :

./src/subtips3.py --input-video ~/Videos/myvideo.mp4  --input-subtitles ~/myvideo.fre.idx --output-resolution simple-def --output-video ~/Videos/myps3vidwithsubs.avi