Subocr is a simple OCR software and collection of scripts that convert DVD
subtitles to .srt text files. Currently it works almost flawlessly with Finnish
subtitles including italic fonts and characters like åäö. Application includes a
GUI that will request user input if an unknown character (or in some cases when
characters can't be distinguished properly, a string) is detected. Program will
then learn from the user feedback and continue working, so it can be used with
any language or character set. Of course, the algorithm is pretty simple and
design pretty much ad-hoc, it might not work so well with all languages and
fonts - but it still works much better than any program that I got to work in
Linux [in September 2012].

I'm not providing the font detection database, but it will be generated
automatically on the fly, you just need to type in the character you see on the
screen. It will take couple of minutes per font to type all the needed
characters.

A script supplied with the program automatically generates individual .srt file
for each title in the DVD, optionally resyncing the subtitles to another video
source. Generating those subtitle files do not require user interaction, if
resyncing isn't necessary, ripping one DVD takes about 5-10 minutes. (Might be
worth mentioning that the subtitle index is hard-coded to the script, if
someone cares, it could be fixed)

The whole application isn't really polished, it was written in one weekend for
converting a batch of DVD subtitles. Setting it up might need some dark magic.

This application uses dvdbackup[1], mplayer version of libdvdread[2] and
libdvdcss[3] for working around stupid DVD encryptions and other issues designed
to make consumers bitter. It uses some parts of subtitleripper[4] to convert DVD
subtitle track to image series and extract timing information.

Copyright © 2012 Riku Palomäki
This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 3 as published by
the Free Software Foundation.

[1] http://dvdbackup.sourceforge.net/
[2] http://www.mplayerhq.hu/
[3] http://www.videolan.org/developers/libdvdcss.html
[4] http://subtitleripper.sourceforge.net/