DVD/Blu-ray has opened up an exciting world of subtitling and closed captioning opportunities

• A DVD Disc can contain closed captions in up to six languages: English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, German and Dutch. CaptionMaker can produce closed captions (.cc and .scc) files for all of these six languages.
• A DVD Disc can contain up to 32 subtitle languages and a Blu-ray up to 255. CaptionMaker can produce subtitles in every language, from Arabic to Zulu, using any Unicode font. This gives you a limitless list of languages from which to choose.

System Operation

• Enter the video's dialogue into any word processor, or use our built-in captioning word processor.
• Use the captioning software to drag-and-drop the subtitles/captions to the desired screen location.
• Run the video, and press the (+) key each time the first word of each subtitle/caption is spoken. The software will automatically read the time code and link it to the proper subtitle/caption.
• Save the file for the appropriate DVD/Blu-ray authoring system.

Software Features

• Closed captions in 6 languages, the maximum number of closed captioned languages available anywhere.
• Outline borders and translucent backgrounds make subtitles easy to read on any background.
• Kerning feature controls space between characters.
• Subtitles or closed captions can be placed anywhere on the screen.
• Text can be loaded from Word, WordPerfect, or any other word processor in any language.
• Text spotting lists with time code in and out can be loaded.
• Built-in word processor is used to quickly format text into individual subtitles or closed captions.
• The video being subtitled or closed captioned appears on the computer monitor, providing true what-you-see-is-what-you-get control.
• Retrieve closed caption data with time code from videos with existing closed captions. After retrieving the closed captions, the file can be used for either closed captioning or subtitling.
• DVD supports up to 32 subtitle streams
• Blu-ray supports up to 255 subtitle streams

Quickly Add Multiple Languages

After you have subtitled/captioned a video in one language and obtained the time codes, the same time codes can be easily used for subsequent languages. In other words, once subtitles/captions are produced for one language, a translation prepared in our captioning file format is all that is needed to subtitle/caption in additional languages.

DVD Closed Caption File Format

A DVD closed caption file is a binary file consisting of a number of lines - one line for each closed caption. Each line starts with a time code which is separated from the closed caption data (in binary format) by a tab character.

DVD/Blu-ray Subtitle Formats

CaptionMaker creates as many files as the number of subtitles. They also create a navigation file. The navigation file lists details (time code, size and position) of each subtitle.

The first item on a line is the name of the TIF file which is a computer picture file of a subtitle using a TrueType Windows font. The next two items are the in and out time codes of a subtitle. The next two items after that are width and height of a subtitle. The last two items are the position of a subtitle on a 720X480 screen.

Since the picture files are rather large, for an one hour video, the size of all the files could easily be close to 50MB. After zipping, it can be reduced to close to 2.5MB.

Note: You need a DVD/Blu-ray authoring system to insert the subtitles on the DVD/Blu-ray. Our captioning software may be used in conjunction with a DVD/Blu-ray authoring system to create the subtitle files that your authoring system requires.