Subtitle manipulation tools for Linux
Subtitles may not mean much for the English-speaking part of the world, but for the rest of us, they are the difference between truly enjoying a movie or just watching the screen, trying to decipher the events.
Gnome Subtitles is probably the best subtitle editing application in Linux. Not only does it offer an easy way to quickly translate subtitles in your own language, but it also provides a video player so that you can sync the text of the file with the words from the movie. Just pause, translate, and move on. You can mark the text as bold, italic, or underline with the click of a button. The application has a find and replace function that allows you to jump to known movie locations, and supports the different video framerates common to todays's movies: 23.976, 24, 25, 29.97, and 30.
On the left of the subtitle editing part of the window there is a column depicting the line number, and two other columns labeled From and To. A text line appears on the screen accordingly to the values of these two columns. You can choose between frames and times; times shows the position of the subtitle line in the movie by hour, minute, second, and millisecond and is easier to work with.
KSubtile is a KDE application that does the same thing as Gnome Subtitles, though it's not as intuitive and makes use of MPlayer to display the video. As soon as you load a subtitle, you'll see the number of lines in the file and the total length in minutes in the info tab. With KSubtile you can cut and copy subtitle lines from one part of the movie and paste them elsewhere. One downside of KSubtile is that it doesn't support UTF-8. One nice touch is a zoom feature that allows you to quickly find specified text. The subtitle text is represented as vertical lines in the Navigator part of the window. Wider lines mean frequent dialog. The editor offers two text boxes in the middle and two left and right arrows on the sides to help you navigate to the point you wish to change. Alternatively, you can press Select and jump directly to the place you want to edit the text..
