Hi,
This is an announcement for a new DVB subtitle conversion tool. You can get it from here:
http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/mikkila/son2srt/
son2srt is a Python script that converts SON (DVDMaestro) bitmap subtitles to the text-based SRT format by calling the free GOCR program. It can be used to process subtitle files generated with the Project X DVB demuxing tool. With a good symbol database (an almost complete one for finnish YLE DVB subtitles is included), the number of errors can easily be under 10 for a two-hour movie. However, corrupted subtitle images will cause problems.
The script is currently not suitable for DVD subtitle conversion because subtitle fonts are not universal. Building a symbol database for each disc would be a tedious job without a good GUI (and frustrating even then). Luckily DVB broadcasters (or at least YLE in Finland) use only one font, which son2srt can handle non-interactively with a complete symbol database.
Resulting SRT files can be used to subtitle transcoded VDR recordings. The package includes a simple script to transcode recordings to MPEG4 AVC + Ogg Vorbis + SRT in a Matroska container.
Regards,
Niko Mikkilä