How to Record Subtitles and Speed up Watching Movies?
Good news: I’m not sick anymore. The bad news is that my stomach will vomit when they invariably kill my favorite bad guy, Chubby Thanos, in Avengers: Endgame this week. Oh, good. I think all great things must end. Except for Tech 911 – Lifehacker’s weekly tech tips column will never go away.
This week, I’m sticking film topics and reply to a question from a reader Lifehacker Sibi (who reads us for over ten years!). They write:
Thanks for your posts! I like to think that I am quite tech savvy, but you are on a different level. I love how you can explain complex technical topics to such a wide audience – keep up the good work!
Question: I am trying to find a method / program that can hardcode the subtitles into a video file at the same time and also edit the video file so that a faster playback speed is set by default.
Background: I usually watch movies / shows in VLC at 1.33x or faster playback speed. (Time is money, right?) At a higher playback speed, to make sure I can catch all the dialogues, I load the subtitles in VLC as .srt files. I have a Plex server that allows me to stream video files from my computer to a Roku-connected TV. My ultimate goal is to be able to play higher / variable speed video files on my Roku connected TV, but also be able to see subtitles.
I am glad to help! And I say this ahead of time since I haven’t done a ton of video encoding in a while. If my memory serves me – to borrow a phrase from an old Japanese show Iron Chef – you can record subtitles to your video using the popular (and having open source) tool HandBrake .
Once you’ve downloaded and installed it, open the video using the app. For this example, I’m using a copy of John Wick that I downloaded from the internet because someone already created a subtitle file (.SRT) for it. (I’m too lazy to do this myself for a plain old video; excuse me, Lionsgate.)
To burn subtitles to your video, click the Subtitles (appropriately named) tab in Handbrake, click Import SRT ( assuming you have one ) and check the Burn box to ensure your subtitles are hardcoded … on top of your movie.
TA-dah!
Regarding the second part of your question – increasing the video playback speed – I was at first a little confused. (I usually just do what you do: increase the speed in my software player, VLC, instead of changing the raw video).
However, I stumbled a bit and think that the tool you are really looking for is Axiom , a useful GUI for the FFmpeg encoder. Handbrake also uses FFmpeg, so the two programs … are similar in execution, only differ greatly in their interfaces.
Download and run Axiom – no installation required – and press Enter to locate and download the movie file. In the Subtitles tab, switch the codec to Record and use the tiny plus sign to locate and select the .SRT file.
From there click on the Video tab and scroll down a bit until you see the Speed setting. Install whatever you want, although I really recommend going to the Filters tab first . That’s why. You will (obviously) want your accelerated video to have synced audio, and the setting to adjust the speed of the latter is actually the Tempo setting in the Filters tab. The slider is fussy – at least it only allows me to go up or down three steps at a time – and that corresponds to a percentage. In other words, a setting of “50” means you slow down the speed of sound in half, a setting of “150” means you increase it by 50%, and so on.
Remember what you installed there (say “140” for example) and go back to the “Videos” tab. Now adjust the speed to match – 140 in my example, which required me to select “Custom” from the dropdown menu and enter it manually.
You can (and should) play with other settings in Axiom to make sure you are getting the correct video and audio quality for your encoding (as well as the correct output format). What I love about Axiom is the preview option. Click this button and you can see if your settings give you exactly the video you expect. (In particular, it is incredibly useful to double-check the video and audio sync.)
Be that as it may, you might want to keep a copy of your unmodified movies elsewhere, in case Plex – the Roku version – ever includes a speed adjustment feature.