I've put together a little app to watch subtitles independently of the video, useful (to me anyway) for watching streaming videos that don't supply Japanese language subtitles. Also could go with any other app, presumably.

Currently it's in the experimental ('alpha') stage, it doesn't even have a name yet really. (I'm thinking 'jimakuman' - 字幕マン - but maybe that's too cheesy? Hmmm.)


It has controls as follows,
' < ' slow subtitles by 0.5 seconds
' <a ' previous subtitle
' a> ' next subtitle
' > ' hasten subtitles by 0.5 seconds
' || ' - ' > ' pause/play
Open File - select an SRT file and as soon as you open it, the clock starts running and it will display your subtitles.
Quit

It's 'always on top' in order to better see it when playing a video in a web browser or other application. This can't be changed.

It only knows about SRT files, will crash if you feed it a bad file name or otherwise upset it as I don't catch a single exception, and for some annoying reason it pops up an empty console window when you run it. It probably only runs on some 64 bit windows machines because I don't have any way to cross-compile.
Some diagnostic information is constantly printed "T: time in seconds N: (next subtitle index) next subtitle time in seconds"

If you've read this far without being scared off and if you want, you can try it out (as is and at your own risk). If it's not obvious the app is 'run.exe' in the SubtitleViewer folder created by unpacking the Zip.

http://www.mediafire.com/download/wc62t1...Viewer.zip

If you are really brave and have Python3.3 installed you can try to run the script directly,
http://www.mediafire.com/download/yqgi7o...7jt/run.py

I've uploaded a new version to the same location (links in the original post should work).

Over a dozen people have downloaded, and I haven't heard any complaints yet so I assume it's at least running for people. I would appreciate it if people could let me know what kind of systems they're having success on, and of course, any problems.

The new version -

- Handles 'next title' and 'previous title' actions properly even when paused. You could read the whole show without ever letting the clock run if you like.

- Catches a couple likely errors and gives a 'No File' message instead of simply crashing when you open a non-existent file or a non-srt file.

- Fixes a bug where the last title was overwritten by the end message as soon as it was displayed.

- The .exe version was properly compiled as a 'GUI' app and the useless console window won't pop up anymore.

I'm planning to change to the wxWindows toolkit after this, so the next version may be substantially different. As far as I can tell, though, it's impossible to get the transparency effects I want with Tkinter. Not sure yet that I can do what I want with wxWindows either, but I'm going to keep fiddling with it.

Chris, can you post a GitHub project for this so that the rest of us can contribute changes as we have time? I can't make promises, but I might be interested in helping w/ bug fixes, etc.

Oh, I hadn't looked at this thread in sooo long! I didn't know anyone had answered, heh.
Thank you for your interest!

I don't even have a current version of python installed but was looking it up to download my own project onto a new laptop, heh.

I'll look into GitHub, but I've got a ton of working hours lately so it'll be a week from now before I have time again.

http://justsubsplayer.codeplex.com

Seems to work well enough. Bear in mind, though, that most subtitles are rarely in sync with the video and you may have to sync them more than once in the same video, pausing the video means also having to pause and re-sync the subtitles, skipping means re-sync'ing as well, the subtitle text is not selectable, etc.

I simply read the subs from Notepad along with the video.

I don't generally have too much trouble keeping my subs synced on the fly, but the need to do so is why I made it so you can jump forward/back titles as well as advance/delay the play time.
Generally I just hit 'next subtitle' as soon as the splash occurs that marks where the commercial was when it was aired (subtitles taken from commercial-free sources don't need even that), and then pause until the characters speak again. A click or two for advancing or delaying the time and everything's good until the next commercial break. (Commercial breaks with no splash are a little trickier, and sometimes I need to rewind the video a bit, which is kind of a pain. Often the first lines after a commercial break are simple ones or repeats of the last line before the commercial so then I can just catch up on the next title and not worry about having missed the chance to read one that wasn't really necessary to read.)
I don't know what tools the other tool offers for on-the-fly adjusting or if there are better tools I could offer. It seems to be inherently a manual problem (barring getting very advanced and listening in on the audio output and trying to identify spoken lines algorithmically ... unless there's some -really- powerful python packages to make that easy to code, I won't be doing that!)

There's no reason that subtitle text can't be cut-and-pasteable, and although I can't do anything about the other tool you mention it is on my wishlist for my own script. I don't think it's even hard, I just need to get my python development environment reinstalled. :o

I have read from printouts or from open text-editors, I just didn't like it very much.