This is an experimental tool to help language-learners exploit parallel subtitles in various ways. Among other things, it can generate bilingual subtitles, review pages, and decks of Anki cards:

Here's the documentation:

• Overview and user documentation
• API documentation (unstable)

Example usage:

# Create a bilingual subtitle file.
substudy combine episode_01_01.es.srt episode_01_01.en.srt \
    > episode_01_01.bilingual.srt

# Export images, audio clips and subtitles as a web page.
substudy export review episode_01_01.mkv \
    episode_01_01.es.srt episode_01_01.en.srt

Installing substudy

The easiest way to install substudy is using the cargo install command. To use this, you'll need Rust 1.15.1 or newer. If you already have rustup installed, you can run:

rustup update stable

If you've never heard of rustup, you can look at the instructions on the rustup page, or you can just run the following:

# Mac and Linux only.  Windows see above.
curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh

You will also need to have a working copies of cmake and the latest version of ffmpeg (2.8.1 or newer), which you might be able to install as follows:

# MacOS X with `brew` installed.
brew install cmake ffmpeg

# Ubuntu 16.04.
sudo apt-get install cmake ffmpeg

# Ubuntu 14.04.
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:mc3man/trusty-media
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install cmake ffmpeg
sudo apt-add-repository -r ppa:mc3man/trusty-media
sudo apt-get update

Once all that is set up, you can then install substudy by running:

cargo install substudy

It should also be possible to get substudy working on Windows, but it's more complicated. See our AppVeyor file for some console-based scripts that you can use as a starting point.

Building substudy

Assuming you have Rust and the other dependencies installed as described above, you can run:

git clone https://github.com/emk/substudy.git
cd substudy
cargo build

If this fails, please feel free to submit an issue.

Using substudy as a library

You can find API documentation on the Rust CI site. Note that all APIs are experimental and subject to change. If you want to use substudy as a library in your own tools, you're encouraged to do so, but it might be worth letting me know which APIs you're using so that I can stabilize them.

Contributing

Please feel welcome to send me a pull request or submit an issue!

Make sure everything continues to work with your changes:

cargo test

Things which I'd love to see substudy support include:

• Creating various sorts of parallel media: subtitles, Anki cards, etc.
• Automatic vobsub to *.srt conversion, using OCR and character databases. There are several open source Windows tools which tackle this, but it should be theoretically possible to do a lot better.

Things which I'll probably merge if they come with clean code and solid test suites:

• Better character set conversion.
• Various sorts of subtitle cleanups.
• Formats other than *.srt.
• Better algorithms for repairing timings and alignment.

I'm happy to leave serious, interactive subtitle editing to Subtitle Edit, and to focus on cases related to language learning, and to things which are convenient to call from the command line. I'd also be happy to have implementations of the most useful subs2srs features in command-line form—it's a wonderful and useful program, but it has too many configuration options and it requires too much work using external utilities.

License

This program is released into the public domain using the CC0 public domain declaration. Our test suites contain a half-dozen lines of subtitles from copyrighted TV shows, which should presumably fall under de minimis, fair use or equivalent exceptions in most jurisdictions.