Technical notes
This fansub disc was made using the procedure outlined in my Linux Digital Fansubbing Guide.
Source video was captured from laserdisc using a Pioneer CLD-D406 laserdisc
player attached to a Hauppauge WinTV
PVR USB capture card. All of the production work was done on my laptop.
Here is a page
containing more information than you could ever possibly want to know
about my laptop.
Because this fansub was made on Linux using very simple software, it does
not have many of the frills or production values that are common with modern
fansubs, such as animated titles, karaoke lyrics, switchable subtitles, etc.
(although the last item would have been omitted even had it been available).
However, I am proud to say that my fansubs have the one thing that counts,
namely, subtitles that are actually pleasant to read on a TV screen.
Materials included with the disc
Unlike most other fansubbers, I include my scripts and production materials
on the disc. They can be accessed using any computer with a DVD-ROM drive.
Linux users will find on the disc almost everything they need to reproduce
or customize my fansubs. Even if you use another platform, you can convert
the SubRip scripts on the disc to another format so that at least you don't
have to start from scratch.
The source video was deliberately omitted from the disc, even though it could
have fit. The reason is that I believe fansubbers should be required to obtain
their own copy of the source video. Except for the source video, all of the
other production items that I used to make the fansub are included.
The rest of this section is only relevant to Linux users. The materials on
the disc are organized as follows:
- bin/ - auxiliary perl programs for script processing
- patches/ - centering patch for the transcode
subtitling program
- ppml/ - header files and compiled scripts in PPML format
- srt/ - source scripts in SRT format (if you want to edit the
scripts, edit these)
You need to compile and install a patched version of transcode using the
supplied centering patch in order to recreate my fansub. The two shell scripts
encode.sh and script.sh in the root directory are used
to launch the subtitling process. The script.sh program compiles
the SRT scripts from srt/ into PPML scripts which are placed in
ppml/. Note that there is a DELAY parameter in the first line of
script.sh, to allow you to enter a (positive or negative) time offset
in seconds in case your source video is shifted from mine. The encode.sh
program then launches transcode to encode the subtitled video using the PPML
scripts. (There are also parameters in the first few lines of encode.sh
for specifying input and output filenames.)
I do not include helper scripts for mastering the DVD, but you can read my
fansubbing guide for
information about how to use dvdauthor
to master discs in Linux.
Credits
All of the dialogue translations are my own. The song lyrics
translations are by Alex Glover.
David Jao (djao@dominia.org)