The VideoLAN Forums

The correct decimal separator in srt files is the comma. 00:00:00,000 is the correct time stamp format. VLC Player, among others, requires this. However, some players and editors apparently do not like commas and substitute decimal points, as in 00:00:00.000 and VLC will not recognise these. (Bsplayer subtitle editor is one that produces incorrect srt files)

Is there any way of convincing VLC Player to accept the 00:00:00.000 format? either a switch or a plugin? It is an easy, but mind numbing, job in windows text editor to change all the 0. 1. etc to 0, 1, etc.

Or does anyone know a freeware subtitle editor/player around as good as Bsplayer's which allows you to edit and resynch subtitle files while playing/scanning the movie. One that then produces the correct srt format. Usually it is a case of moving the whole lot backwards or forwards as in audio sync problems. Any language corrections I tent to use a text editor for.

Why do I not just use Bsplayer, which recognises both the "." and the "," ? well it is too fat and takes too long to start to use as a default player. Plus there are many other players that, correctly, will also not eat "."s. Yes, I have also asked Bsplayer why they use the wrong format, up to now they have not rewritten it.

Fill a bug request.

I did some more research and reported the bug to Bsplayer. It seems they currently use the default system decimal deliniater and so if I change that to a comma it works. I have hopes they will fix the bug though. The reason few people have noticed it becomes clear too, most VLC users are probably European and would use the comma on the system. I am English living in Germany and use both.

I do not see how reporting a bug here would help, as VLC behaves according to spec. I could ask, I suppose, that VLC is changed so as to accept decimal points but I really do not think they should, unless the file format spec is officially changed too.

Plus I found a freebie called SubSync 0.2.15 which is actually a better subtitle editor than Bsplayer, and seems so far to always use commas for the timestamp. The nice thing is it accepts incorrect srt files as input, and actually changes the "."s back to ","s

I also found Powergrep, with which I should be able to use regular expressions "([0-9]\.[0-9)" to both scan all *.srt in all my discs and change all 00.000 to 00,000 at the same time, once I set it up anyway.

Thanks for the help. I really like VLC.

I do not see how reporting a bug here would help, as VLC behaves according to spec. I could ask, I suppose, that VLC is changed so as to accept decimal points but I really do not think they should, unless the file format spec is officially changed too.

Thanks for the help. I really like VLC.

this isn't relevant, we sould modify VLC to accept those broken files, since there are many broken files...

Fair enough. How do I ask for the change, In Feature Requests?

trac.videolan.org/vlc

I have added support for such buggy file by [0ea77dfd682d73ec7e1b0c089dc52d1de8e9e690] (vlc master).
It would be cool if you could post a sample somewhere to validate the fix