SubRip
| Filename extension |
.srt |
|---|
SubRip is an optical character recognition program for Windows which rips (extracts) subtitles and their timings from video files or DVDs, recording them as a text file. Subrip is also the name of the subtitle format created by this software. The caption files are named with the extension .SRT. This format is supported by most software video players and subtitle creation programs, detailed in the article Comparison of media players.
In practice, SubRip is first configured to correctly detect subtitles in a video file. The correct video codecs (DGMPGDec for DVDs) must be installed, along with AviSynth. SubRip is configured while displaying a frame with subtitles, including their color, shape of the subtitle area, and any required image manipulation (fattening, contrast adjustments). After trial and fine tuning, extraction is then performed automatically for the entire file during playback.
The time format used is hours:minutes:seconds,milliseconds, with the seconds field precise to three decimal places. The decimal separator used is the comma, since the program was written in France, and the line break used is the CR+LF pair. Subtitles are indexed numerically, starting at 1.
Versions
SubRip was written by French programmer Brain (& Dub), starting in 1999. On March 3, 2000 the first version, SubRip 0.5 beta, was released — as all the consecutive versions declared as Beta. His last version was SubRip 0.97 beta — published September 8, 2001. Afterwards he stopped development, and upon receiving several requests for Linux support Brain released the SubRip source code under the GPL licence. SubRip is coded with Delphi 5. The original website is now offline, but a copy is viewable at the Internet Archive.
Only seven weeks later T.V. Zuggy and Guimli released their first own version of the program — SubRip 0.98 — that was also acknowledged on Brain's site. For the SubRip 1.50 Beta 3 release (on January 5, 2006) code has been moved to Delphi 2005 (after a time with Delphi 7). The latest version is 1.50 beta 4. Programming is now mostly done by ai4spam who announced in October 2006 that he is going to abandon it after releasing one more beta.
Fields
- Subtitle number
Start time --> End time
Text of subtitle (one or more lines)
Blank line
Unicode and basic HTML tags such as <i>, <b> and <font> in subtitles are supported by most players, but VLC and some subtitle editors (SubResync, Subtitle Workshop) do not handle these tags well. There is no formal specification of the .SRT file format.
Sample file
1 00:00:20,000 --> 00:00:24,400 In connection with a dramatic increase in crime in certain neighbourhoods, 2 00:00:24,600 --> 00:00:27,800 The government is implementing a new policy...
MPlayer tolerates missing index lines as in the example below:
00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:00,999 I know this.. 00:00:01,000 --> 00:00:01,999 It's a unix system!