Many of us have been through the annoying feeling of viewing a video where the subtitles are off by one or two seconds. This is especially true when it's a foreign language video, and the subtitles are extremely important. Have you ever thought of using a software to adjust it? Well, there are plenty of them.
I tried Gnome Subtitles recently, and under the "Timings > Adjust" menu option, I could shift multiple selected subtitles by the number of seconds I wanted to adjust them (make sure the name of the video and the subtitle file are same, in order to ensure that the video opens up automatically when you open the subtitle file). Quite a handy tool! For more recent versions of Ubuntu, you can use many other software, including KDenLive.
You can also adjust subtitles using VLC or FFMPEG.
The SRT file
Although called "SubRip" files, the SRT stands for SubRip Text (in web format, they are Subtitle Resource Tracks). The time that each subtitle should be displayed is represented as <hour>:<minute>:<second>,<millisecond>. There's even support to specify the font colour, font style and even the coordinates to display the text at.
Generating subtitles
There are people whose jobs involve performing audio transcription. They'd listen to audio, type in the text and the time at which the text appears. The process is very cumbersome because they need to constantly move forward and backward along the audio track, while needing to type what they hear. This means their hands are always occupied. So some enterprising individuals decided to create a foot-operated pedal which the transcriptionists could use to control the audio playback. The pedal allowed them to rewind, pause, play or fast forward.
Of course, today there are machine learning algorithms which detect speech and automatically generate subtitles. Even if the transcription is incorrect at places, it's easier for the transcriptionist to fix it.
I'll leave you with an amusing "interview" of a person who is quite confident that he does not require subtitles.
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