Automatic video clip subtitle generation?

[Dirk Hohndel]

Lutz Vieweg <lvml at 5t9.de> writes:
>
> I've got a somewhat weird feature idea, and first want to find out
> whether somebody else would find this useful:
>
> Many divers like to record videos while diving - I certainly do.
> While editing recordings from my last vacation (if you are interested
> in the result and you don't mind transferring 3.6GB, you can download
> it here:
>> http://archive.org/download/Curacao_Under_the_Wind_and_Under_Water/Curacao_Under_the_Wind_and_Under_Water_2012.mp4  ) I noticed how tedious it was to keep track of what scene was recorded
> where - just because there were so many (about 1000) clips. That caused
> me to give up the idea of creating a subtitle track that would have -
> optional for the viewer - informed about the dive site where the
> shots where taken.
>
> Later on I found that since the camera itself records the time and date
> in a (PGS-) subtitle track (inside its AVCHD *.MTS files), it should
> theoretically be possible to automatically generate such an informal
> subtitle track, by extracting the dive site information from the
> subsurface data, indexed by the date and time found in the *.MTS files.
>
> The coarse idea would be to first extract the PGS subtitles from the
> .MTS files (using e.g. mplayer), then to OCR them (using tesseract or
> alike), then to lookup the time stamps in the subsurface .xml file,
> extracting the dive spot location from there, then to create a
> subtitle track from that and re-mux the *.MTS files into e.g. MKV
> containers along with the additional subtitle track. I still have to
> figure out if that is possible in a way that would survive the rest
> of my editing workflow (using avidemux and kdenlive).

Wow. That's quite a project...

> But before I endeavor to try this, I'd be interested in some feed back:
> - Is such a feature that you would find useful?
> - Does your underwater camera also record date/time as PGS subtitles?
> - Do you have any experience with passing subtitles through a video
>    post production workflow?

So I don't take longer videos under water and this certainly wouldn't
really work for me. But more power to you!

/D