Can we play videos with subtitles?

DEVONthink Tips
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I have a video A.mp4, and a subtitle file B.srt, but I just couldn’t find a way to let the video player use the subtitle.

The most relavant (and probably the only relavant) post I’ve found is Script Request: Merging Video and Subtitle Files

but from the content of that post, I guess the poster was also troubled by the problem that you cannot use subtitles when playing video files in devonthink3, so that he wanted to merge subtitles and videos into one file.

I think subtitle support would be great, especially when we are studying a course with complex vocabulary, or a course in foreign language.

By the way, some statistics show that young people are very likely to turn subtitles on when they watch online stream video. So I think there is indeed a need for subtitle support.

I do not think enabing subtitles is too much a difficult feature. The only reason I can think of not having this feature is that the video and subtitle files are in different locations in devonthink database. However this is also not a big issue. You can just prompt to select where the subtitle is, or more intuitively like what IINA does now: just drag and drop the subtitle file into the video you’re playing, and that subtitle is turned on.

Update:

I later figured out that there are different kinds of subtitles: “soft” embeded subtitles, hard substitles, and external subtitles.

What I was originally referring to in the post is external subtitles.

But I still think external subtitle support would be great. Now I use ffmpeg to merge my video files and subtitles so that I can view subtitles in devonthink3. But it is troublesome.

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Why? You could probably automate that process, even using a smart rule in DT.

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I agree it is troublesome.
If we could simply drag and drop the srt file onto the video or into the same group as the video and if DT3 would manage that on the finder side of things placing the file into the same folder so that if it is opened by any video tool on the mac, the srt file would be found, that would be great. However, I certainly agree that we should not be modifying the original file. DT3 is a great tool for archiving but if you have to then keep the original and another copy where you have merged things, it’s wasting space and is inefficient.

Would be best if DT3 matches the srt and mov or mp4 together based on the name and keeps them together in finder as well.

And it would be amazing (and expected) if you just can use in the internal DT3 browser to play the video that the srt would be used and appear on the video automatically.

Anybody have a solution that doesn’t require processing?

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There are no “folders” in DT unless you index them. Groups are a just a concept, folders are real (kind of). Putting something in a group doesn’t do anything “on the finder side”.

Aside from that: Why is it preferable to add all the necessary code for this rather special use case to DT instead of using readily available tools and stitching them together with a script? This approach will probably also result in a way earlier solution than waiting for a DT upgrade to add this functionality (I wouldn’t hold my breath for that to arrive).

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