Hacker Timesnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin
SubSync: Subtitle Speech Synchronizer (subsync.online)
130 points by severine on Jan 4, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 24 comments


Thank god someone finally built this, I've been kicking around this for forever in my head (glue together some STT library and logic to adjust subtitle offsets) but I never had the time.

Really I wish Plex would just build this in, it's right up their alley. Movies aren't terrible since you can adjust the offset once (still a huge PITA and I feel like a toddler making an "L" with my hands to tell right from left when it comes to knowing "Do I need to increase or decrease the offset to fix this?", "Ok, I saw the subs before I heard it so I need to increase the offset", etc). TV shows are a whole other cluster. To be fair 80%+ of the time I have no issues with subs on my TV shows but if it's off then you can plan on readjusting after almost every commercial break.

I used to watch Letterkenny and I needed subs for that show to keep up but the only ones I could find were off and after each commercial I needed to adjust them by over 5 seconds which, at 50ms intervals, is a massive PITA.


> still a huge PITA and I feel like a toddler making an "L" with my hands to tell right from left when it comes to knowing "Do I need to increase or decrease the offset to fix this?", "Ok, I saw the subs before I heard it so I need to increase the offset", etc

Phew, it's not just me then.


Haha, nope, not just you. I can't count the number of times I've gone too far in one direction and it's taken me 20+ adjustments before I realize I've overshot and now I'm making it worse with each button press. I don't know if it's just a subset of us but my brain has not found the "trick" to noticing this, I have to very consciously think about it each time I make an offset. No joke, I've consider laminating a quick "crash course"/"flow chart" of how to fix subtitles just for myself since I have to stop and think every time I do it.


The wording is what's confusing and there's no easy way to remember if +50ms means "The subtitles should appear 50ms later (+50ms delay)" or "The subtitles should appear 50ms earlier (Fix a +50ms adjustment)"...


Exactly! Every single time I have imagine there are 2 tracks in something like Logic Pro and the videos stays where it is and I can only shift the subtitle track, once I visualize that I’m able to figure out what needs to be done. I wish it was closer to second nature.


Several of these tools over the last couple of years, I use https://github.com/kaegi/alass. Maybe you could manually setup a cron job over your Plex Library.


I tried a couple of these command line tools recently, alass was the best of those. Really fast too. Still, it didn't work perfectly; I had subtitles for a different cut of a movie, it got two out of three segments right, but I had to manually fix the last segment. Either way, this is great development, I remember fully manual syncing being really troublesome.


Yeah, that's what I really need to do, just let it crawl through my library. Because I'm super lazy I want there to be a *arr project to manage this all for me and let me set things to "need fixed" and have it leave alone things I know are correct. I had high hopes for Bazarr but for some reason every time I've tried it it's fallen over after a few days , this would be a cool feature for Bazarr to add.


I haven't tried bazarr, but the feature seems to exist: https://github.com/morpheus65535/bazarr/blob/master/frontend...


Well I'll be damned, it looks like they have integration with this tool (from the post), very cool. Looks like I need to spin that container back up and track down what brings it to a grinding halt so I can finally fix it. Thank you!


Small correction but for some movies you might need to adjust the timings more than once if the subs run in a different sync to the video, it's tied to the video FPS and subs might start drifting if they're synced up against another copy of the movie that has a different FPS.


TIL. Thanks! I don't watch very many movies and when I do I'm with people that think subtitles are a massive inconvenience (for them). Thank you for letting me about that as I'm sure one day I will run into this and I would have been befuddled as to how they were falling out of sync.


Is this yours, severine?

It blows my mind that this isn't a standard feature in video players. Especially Plex, which can download subtitles from OpenSubtitles, but even though the text is perfect you have to either wade through a bunch of different subtitles or manually fix the timing for every video through a painful interface in 50ms increments.


> Is this yours, severine?

No, not even related. I had to do the task today, found it through DDG and had success, so I shared it.

I have a hunch this is going to be a common feature in some video players, and it has interesting possibilities!



Oh, that's great. The closed caption space is highly frustrating.

One example is any film that has its own occasional subtitles. Like a movie that's mostly english will sometimes put english translations of the occasional foreign language being spoken. Then, the actual closed captioning will superimpose the very NOT helpful [Speaking Foreign Language] on top of the words I want to see. Or randomly, the words go to the top of the screen, covering people's faces.

Then, all sorts of other issues like two words being stuck together, a homonym being used when it's clearly not the right one, terrible typos, etc.

I suppose it's just not a priority, and you get what you pay for. I get it when it's something like local news. But for a movie that will be watched for decades, it's a shame.


Oh, the time and trouble I would have saved!

Now I'm set for the future, thanks!


I want the same for audio. Anyone knows a tool for that?


Isn't this what forced alignment tools do?



The original posted URL was https://subsync.online/http://localhost:4000/

What a strange mistake! Was it just a copy/paste error?


> Was it just a copy/paste error?

Occam's Razor says, "yes!"


broken url


Fixed now.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: