Videoteam/Subtitles/redo

Join the Alioth debconfsubs group

We are using an Alioth project and its Git repository to coordinate the work on subtitles (especially the reviewing and translating parts). You can anonymously browse the repo via HTTP or clone it anonymously via:

 git clone http://anonscm.debian.org/git/debconfsubs/debconfsubs.git

In order to have write access to the repo, you'll need to create an account on Alioth and ask to join the debconfsubs group on Alioth. Then you can clone the repo with:

 git clone git+ssh://username@git.debian.org//git/debconfsubs/debconfsubs.git

Lock the video you want to work on the List of videos section. You can ask in #debconf-subs or the mailing list for somebody to lock it for you

Tools and video

First of all you'll need a subtitle editor: in Debian we have several as gnome-subtitles, subtitleeditor, gaupol and aegisub. In this tutorial I'll explain the workflow I use with aegisub.

# apt-get install aegisub

Then you'll need the video: you can find all the videos from DebConfs and mini DebConfs here.

Download it with:

 wget url-of-the-video

Adding subtitles

1. Launch aegisub
2. open the video (via Video → Open video) (I actually prefer to use only the audio)
3. open the audio file associated (via Audio → Open Audio from Video). Now you'll have a frame with the video and a frame with the audio track.
4. open a new sub file (via File → New subtitles), then play the first segment of audio and write the transcription below.

The audio segments are pre-defined by default, but obviously you can drag the start or the end line to create a shorter or a longer segment. Remember to always click to the "Commit" button (or press enter) to save each subtitle line, or it will vanish without saving when you go ahead with another segment.

Tips

• Please note that aegisub saves automatically every few minutes: you can find the backup at ~/.aegisub-2.1/autosave. This is particularly useful as aegisub tend sometimes to crash

• When you want to check your progress and/or reviewing the file so far, you have to use an external videoplayer: the built-in player doesn't

sync audio and video (it is just used to adjust subtitles positions, not to do a review or to play the video) If you use mplayer, you'll just have to run:

 mplayer video -sub subtitlefile

• Note also that aegisub saves in .ass format. While .ass is quite cool because supports styling (bold, italic, underline) and comments, the file is not really easy to review. For that I preferred to export .ass into .srt: you can do this via File → Export subtitles...

Review

When you are finished with it, you can add the newly created .srt file to the repository. Please name the srt file using the following scheme: 'name-of-the-video.xx.srt' where xx is the two letter language code as per ISO 639-1.

English subtitles for DebConf13 will go to /DebConf13/english/ directory. If you are adding a new language, please create the related directory under /DebConf13/ and put there your translations.

Then, update the status of the subtitles on the status.txt file, simply adding the number of the video/subtitle and something like "to be reviewed" or "ready".

Then you can ask for review on debian-l10n-english@lists.debian.org (with the tag [RFR] in the subject) or to the speaker of the talk.

Publishing the subtitles

I've not access to the server where the videos are stored, so I'll ask h01ger to upload them for us. We will wait till we have some ready before asking him to publish them.