Subconvert - movie subtitles converter.

Subconvert is movie subtitles converter and editor aiming to be fast, lightweight and easy to use. It supports a wide variety of subtitle formats, can process files in batches and is available both as terminal application and with a graphical frontend. Most things, like file encoding or movie framerate are detected automatically so you can just sit and quickly enjoy your lovely subtitles!

Installation

Arch users: you can install Subconvert from AUR.

Since a version 1.0.0, autotools have been introduced. Most probably, they are already installed on your system. If not, install automake and autoconf.

From now on we'll suppose that you changed directory to the one in which this README.md file is located.

To create Subconvert build system, run:

$ ./autogen.sh

Note: above command creates a bunch of files. If you ever want do remove all of them, just use git: git clean -f -d.

Now it's time to configure your build/installation. You do this via configure script (see ./configure --help for details). The most common option is to change prefix, i.e. a directory where Subconvert will be installed. Suppose that you would like to install Subconvert into ~/.local/share/subconvert. Your prefix in that case will be ${HOME}/.local. It is a parent directory for share, bin, lib, etc. Default prefix (the one used when you don't specify --prefix) is /usr. Note: you'll need a root access to install Subconvert into /usr.

Suppose you want to use ~/.local prefix:

$ ./configure --prefix ${HOME}/local

To build and install Subconvert:

$ make
$ make install

Note: If you have previous Subconvert installation, remove it first: make reinstall.

If ${prefix}/bin isn't in your $PATH, you might consider adding Subconvert to it:

$ mkdir -p ${HOME}/bin
$ cd ${HOME}/bin && ln -s ${prefix}/bin/subconvert

Removing

To remove Subconvert, proceed with Installation steps. After invoking configure script (with a correct Subconvert prefix), simply run:

$ make uninstall

Usage

Note: Most recent usage description is always available by subconvert --help. There are also wiki pages that describe some aspects of Subconvert usage more precisely.

You can use graphical or commandline interface. Default subconvert invocation executes graphical interface. It is an interactive window in which you can convert and edit movie subtitles. It's described more thoroughly on Subconvert wiki.

To access commandline interface, use -c switch:

$ subconvert -c file1.srt file2.txt

Above invocation will convert file1.srt and file2.txt to the default subtitles format (which is SubRip). It will create file2.srt and will try to overwrite file1.srt (don't worry, unless you used -f switch, Subconvert will first ask you what to do).

Output filename syntax

It's not uncommon to add some kind of prefix/suffix to converted subtitles. Like this:

my_subtitles.srt --> converted_my_subtitles.extension

When you specify output filename (via -o option), you can tell Subconvert to use input file name base. Subconvert will substitute with it all appearances of %f in output file name. See an example:

$ ls
$ file1.srt  file2.txt
$ subconvert -c file1.srt file2.txt -o "conv_%f.ABC"
$ ls
$ conv_file1.ABC  conv_file2.ABC  file1.srt  file2.txt

You can escape "%f" by adding second percent sign ("%"):

$ subconvert -c file1.srt -o "conv_%%f.ABC"
$ ls
$ conv_%f.ABC  file1.srt  file2.txt

You can also substitute %e, with original file extension (without a dot .):

$ subconvert -c file1.srt -o "conv_%f.%e_suffix"
$ ls
$ conv_file1.srt_suffix  file1.srt  file2.txt

Subtitle Property Files

You can create a common set of subtitle properties and apply all of them at once. Say, your subtitles are usually iso-8859-4 encoded and you usually convert them to TMP. You can set those settings with Subtitle Properties Editor (available via GUI: Tools -> Subtitle Properties Editor) and use them each time:

$ subconvert -c file1.srt file2.txt -o "~/subs/%f.tmp" -p ~/subs/iso88594_tmp.spf
$ ls ~/subs
$ file1.tmp  file2.tmp

Dependencies

• Python 3.2+
• python3-pyqt5
• python3-chardet
• MPlayer
• gettext

Additionaly, to build and install Subconvert you'll need:

• autotools (autoconf + automake)
• intltool
• pyrcc5 (comes with pyqt5-dev-tools)

License

Subconvert is free software, available under terms of GNU General Public License 3. For details see License.txt which should be delivered with Subconvert.