One of the big uses of Aegisub that I remember from many years ago is anime fansubbing, which also drove the specification for the subtitle format it uses, ASS (Advanced Substation Alpha), which continues to see huge use today and is much more flexible than other formats used by DVD and Blu-Ray for example.
In the hayday of anime fansubs, there was often an arms race between different groups to see who could program the flashiest effects and karaoke subtitle styles into their releases. Even then I found them gaudy as all hell, but the craft was certainly respected!
Also, for those who aren't familiar with anime fansubbing, I can't emphasize enough how optimized it was. Shows would be released online within 1-2 days of the original airing on Japanese TV, with fan-translated, high-quality, QC'd subtitles. The community had high standards, and they'd normally beat the official English-language release at accuracy and readability. Aegisub was a big part of that and it's one of my favourite FOSS programs to use.
Indeed. I think it was Commie's release of Steins;Gate that had karaoke fx for the opening theme that literally blue-screen people's computers, because of the font they used triggering something in Windows GDI, so they had to rerelease a toned-down version.
unanimated's typesetting guide is still up, if anyone wants to see the insane amount of :effort: bored college kids used to put into subtitles: https://unanimated.github.io/ts/index.htm
Yeah, one of my favourite examples from Commie is the treatment they gave to the opening for Lovestory (Koimonogatari) from the Monogatari series.
The visuals of the opening itself flit and transition between old 80s style shoujo animation and a more modern style, so they take the opportunity to also dynamically change the style of the subtitles between the old black-bordered piss-yellow ones of old DVDs and the sharper style of today.
I suppose this is mostly used for generation of novel subtitles, but there's probably enough infrastructure out there to combine Whisper and Llama to build a local-first closed-caption-style subtitling system.
I've seen enough bad and desynced subtitles from opensubtitles.org that could easily be fixed up with a transcription. Some of them seem to be a result of poor OCR of Bluray bitmapped captions.
I run a regular movie livestream and Whisper has been a godsend. It's really impressively accurate for the most part, at least when the audio is relatively clear.
Lots of the stuff I play is long-forgotten 80s Z-movie trash, so there are frequently no official subtitles/captions available. Whisper has been a very good substitute. (It's not perfect, and it sometimes has bizarre omissions or hallucinations -- once it hallucinated a racial slur, yikes!)
The English model even knows the common non-English languages pretty decently, so you can for example subtitle anime with it if you really want to.
> I've seen enough bad and desynced subtitles from opensubtitles.org that could easily be fixed up with a transcription.
This is what made me be wary of free subtitle sites: I discovered that sometimes (often?), the English language subtitles are simply auto-translated from, say, the Romanian subs. Amusing yes, accurate no.
One of the big uses of Aegisub that I remember from many years ago is anime fansubbing, which also drove the specification for the subtitle format it uses, ASS (Advanced Substation Alpha), which continues to see huge use today and is much more flexible than other formats used by DVD and Blu-Ray for example.
In the hayday of anime fansubs, there was often an arms race between different groups to see who could program the flashiest effects and karaoke subtitle styles into their releases. Even then I found them gaudy as all hell, but the craft was certainly respected!
Also, for those who aren't familiar with anime fansubbing, I can't emphasize enough how optimized it was. Shows would be released online within 1-2 days of the original airing on Japanese TV, with fan-translated, high-quality, QC'd subtitles. The community had high standards, and they'd normally beat the official English-language release at accuracy and readability. Aegisub was a big part of that and it's one of my favourite FOSS programs to use.
Indeed. I think it was Commie's release of Steins;Gate that had karaoke fx for the opening theme that literally blue-screen people's computers, because of the font they used triggering something in Windows GDI, so they had to rerelease a toned-down version.
unanimated's typesetting guide is still up, if anyone wants to see the insane amount of :effort: bored college kids used to put into subtitles: https://unanimated.github.io/ts/index.htm
BTW, ASS subtitles can be used with HTML5 videos in the browser using https://github.com/libass/JavascriptSubtitlesOctopus
Yeah, one of my favourite examples from Commie is the treatment they gave to the opening for Lovestory (Koimonogatari) from the Monogatari series.
The visuals of the opening itself flit and transition between old 80s style shoujo animation and a more modern style, so they take the opportunity to also dynamically change the style of the subtitles between the old black-bordered piss-yellow ones of old DVDs and the sharper style of today.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLlytsgLcr4
The submitted URL was https://aegisub.org/blog/aegisub-3.4.0-released/, but we changed it to the home page since the project hasn't been discussed on HN before, other than in a few comments (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
Interested readers may want to look at both!
I suppose this is mostly used for generation of novel subtitles, but there's probably enough infrastructure out there to combine Whisper and Llama to build a local-first closed-caption-style subtitling system.
I've seen enough bad and desynced subtitles from opensubtitles.org that could easily be fixed up with a transcription. Some of them seem to be a result of poor OCR of Bluray bitmapped captions.
Aegis is great for authoring new subtitles but if you're just looking to sync then take a look at https://github.com/smacke/ffsubsync
Plex also recently added auto-sync subtitles to the Plex Pass
https://support.plex.tv/articles/auto-sync-subtitles/
I run a regular movie livestream and Whisper has been a godsend. It's really impressively accurate for the most part, at least when the audio is relatively clear.
Lots of the stuff I play is long-forgotten 80s Z-movie trash, so there are frequently no official subtitles/captions available. Whisper has been a very good substitute. (It's not perfect, and it sometimes has bizarre omissions or hallucinations -- once it hallucinated a racial slur, yikes!)
The English model even knows the common non-English languages pretty decently, so you can for example subtitle anime with it if you really want to.
> I've seen enough bad and desynced subtitles from opensubtitles.org that could easily be fixed up with a transcription.
This is what made me be wary of free subtitle sites: I discovered that sometimes (often?), the English language subtitles are simply auto-translated from, say, the Romanian subs. Amusing yes, accurate no.
Overview: https://aegisub.org/docs/latest/overview/