Tag: os x

This is one of those things that you just wouldn’t expect to be so damn difficult: create SubRip .srt files for videos. My main use for this isn’t to subtitle foreign speech, or create subtitles for the hard of hearing. Rather, I just need to caption screencasts and I’d rather make it more accessible than printing text onto the video in ScreenFlow. I have use cases where it’d be very helpful to be able to do both Spanish and English captions and the user to get the one they need automatically. A lot of these screencasts are shared via Google Drive, so the YouTube-style captioning works well – *if* you can create the SubRip files.

There are tons of pretty awful apps out there for this, but I couldn’t find a single one that I would actually *want* to use – and that worked crash-free, with the video format I’m using, etc and so on.

For some reason, I hadn’t noticed that ScreenFlow can handle all this *in situ*. (Yes, doh.) It isn’t the smoothest implementation ever, but it’s usable. I don’t know why they don’t just allow the start/end times to be dragged, but there is a keyboard shortcut for it. Also, the caption track doesn’t work if there’s no audio in the project, which is annoying. Anyway, at the end of it, the SRT can be exported and on the one small test I did, works perfectly.