I love music videos. I *love* them.
But whenever I watch Japanese PVs or listen to songs, I usually don't know half of the words that I'm hearing. It would be a good way to learn some more Japanese, but I'm too lazy to look up the lyrics and follow along every time that I watch or listen one. If my PV collection actually contained the lyrics as subtitles, I think it would be very beneficial.

So as I was out having lunch today, I thought to myself, "why don't I just sub all of my PVs myself?" It's not really all that much work, maybe about 10 minutes per video, for barebones lyrics subtitles.

But of course, then I happened to think that maybe there are some others out there who might benefit from these subtitles as well. So why keep them all to myself? Maybe even other people would be interested in subbing their own collections, and we could eventually have subs for almost every PV in existence (ok, maybe not :p)

So, would anyone else be interested in this? Maybe I could start up a small site or something where we could share the subs.

Sound interesting, are you planning on making hardsubs or softsubs so we can SRS?
Two programs that may help are lyricsmaster for a quick way to get kanji lyrics (requires itunes) and minilyrics which has timings for a few of the more popular songs.

You are too lazy to google "song title 歌詞", but want to start a subbing group? The first stage of that would be... looking up the song lyrics. That 10 minutes figure is very optimistic. You've got to find the lyrics, copy them (most sites disable copy&paste so you need to mess around with enabling/disabling javascript), time them, format them, etc). A more honest estimate is 30mins-1hr per song of boring manual labor that could have otherwise spent studying or doing something enjoyable. ...or you could just google them in about 3 seconds whenever you want to watch a video). I'd also like to have PVs with jsubs, but it falls under the "would like to have but not worth the effort" category (imo).

I recommend just using a browser plugin that lets you customize the search sites so you can quickly lookup the lyrics from an appropriate site. Personally I just use an itunes helper that inserts the lyrics into the ID3 tags of my music and displays them automatically whenever I play a song (not bothering with PVs).

If you're really hell bent on it, why not just volunteer with an existing PV subbing group? They normally do translations of course but most I've seen are bilingual karaoke style subs.

RobotsAnger: definitely softsubs

Jarvik7: It's not just a matter of looking up the lyrics, it's a matter of having the lyrics EVERY SINGLE TIME. Also, I like to watch my videos in fullscreen, but I can't look at a sheet of lyrics unless I shrink my video down to a small window.
I really don't think my figure of 10 minutes is too optimistic. Many years ago, I did anime fansubbing, and it would take me about 30mins-1hr to do full karaoke timing on a song. Now, I have absolutely no interest in all that flashy crap, so its just a matter of timing a few lines (most songs have what? 20-30 lines of text?). Timing it doesn't take much longer than just listening to it straight through.
And, I didn't know that PV subbing groups even existed o.o Got any names or links?

jpopsuki is probably the place to start to look for a subbing group.

Jarvik7 Wrote:jpopsuki is probably the place to start to look for a subbing group.

Unfortunately, it seems to be invite-only

Once subbed, you can subs2srs the songs

HerrPetersen Wrote:Once subbed, you can subs2srs the songs

Definitely not a good idea considering how crappy the Japanese in most songs is.

For those interested, http://kitsunekko.net/lyrics/ has timings for 1,872 different anime songs.

They are all in .lrc format which is fairly straightforward and can be easily converted to .srt or .ass subtitles:

Code:

[offset:200]
[ar:.hack Liminality - See-Saw]
[ti:edge]
[al:.hack//Liminality]
[by:kitsunekko]
[00:00.00]
[00:06.00]edge
[00:06.00].hack//Liminality
[00:06.00]作詞：梶浦由記／作曲：梶浦由記／編曲：梶浦由記／
[00:06.00]歌：See-Saw
[00:06.00]
[00:06.65]このままずっと行くのね嘘を積み重ねても
[00:12.59]この道を二度と戻る事は出来ない
[00:18.70]あの時踏み外した境界線の向こうに
[00:24.64]君はどんな夢描いて落ちて行った
[00:30.56]
[00:30.99]明日には見えてくる未来なんてロクでもないけど
...

Wow, that's a really nice resource!