Fix out of sync subtitles with Python!

This is an update of my old post from a couple of years ago.

[Edit – October 2015]: I created an in-browser version of subslider, called subslider.js. Just visit this page and follow the instructions, or read this blog post if you want to know more about it!

After using that script quite a few times, and loving it, I decided to give it a facelift and add the one feature that I’ve been wishing it had for all this time: the option to just tell it the timestamp of the first dialog without performing any math 🙂

Yeah, it’s simple math, but having to use base 60 means more brain CPU time wasted (and above all, it means more time separating me from my movie!).

I also moved the code to GitHub, so you can find it here: SubSlider. And this is the direct link to the python script, for the impatient.

The old way of specifying offsets using +/- has been replaced my a more argparse-standard system of flags. Also, the new feature I mentioned above can be used by running the script like this:

python subslider.py -s 1:23,450 MySubFile.srt

assuming your subtitles file is called MySubFile.srt and assuming that the first dialog in the movie takes place at 1:23,450. This time, there’s an “interactive” dialog that asks you to choose the first line among the first 10 lines in the .srt file. I added it because sometimes you get the equivalent of opening titles in the .srt, and that doesn’t help when you’re synchronizing.

If you want to get a different number of lines, you can simply change the LINES_TO_SHOW variable at line 43 to whatever number you prefer.

As always, feel free to contribute 🙂