How to extract subtitles from Youku?

[bernardpar]

Hello,

I try to watch movies on Youku, however they are usually a little bit too difficult for me, even with subtitles.

To make the input more comprehensible, I plan to

1. extract subtitles from the movie

2. export them to txt document

3. read them in Pleco reader

4. add difficult words to Pleco Flashcards

5. revise Flashcards

5. watch the movie again with/or without subtitles

However, I have no idea how to carry out the step 1. I know it is possible with Youtube, but it Yoku format seems to be different. Thanks in advance.

Bernard

[Koxinga]

AFAIK, subtitles in Youku videos are mostly embedded in the video, and are not stored separately the way some Youtube's subtitles are. For a lot of movies, you should be able to find the subtitles on shooter.cn. Otherwise, try using Pleco's OCR on your phone. That way you should be able to easily make flashcards out of the scanned words.

[Demonic_Duck]

I can't imagine that Pleco's OCR would be very successful with a noisy background such as an image from a video, would it?

[drencrom]

There are subtitling applications out there that will do OCR on the text shapes. It even works on Chinese. However, it works by learning, so every time it sees an unfamiliar character it asks you to write it so it can remember for the rest of the video. The problem being of course, that you don't know how to write the character. Search for SubRip and if that doesn't do it, search for subtitle ripping. You might have to download the video and burn to a DVD file before the software will work correctly.

Honestly, you're doing it backwards. Instead of viewing the video and then trying to get subtitles, go download some shows that already have .srt subtitle files. Obviously this wouldn't be on Youku but rather sites that allow full download of video files.

[Koxinga]

I can't imagine that Pleco's OCR would be very successful with a noisy background such as an image from a video, would it?

From my experience, noisy backgrounds are usually fine, because there is enough contrast between the video and the text. And in case of widescreen videos, the subtitles are often in the black rectangle under the video, so that solves the "problem".

Low resolution of the videos is a bigger problem.