Subtitle delay adjustment related suggestions

[evadedave]

I often encounter .SRTs (text based subs) that don't match the voices on screen exactly and whose timings need to be adjusted. However the procedure to do this is unnecessarily tedious. Here's what I do:

1. I need to touch the screen once to make the controls visible.

Issue #1: The OSD disappears in next to no time at all, so if any of the controls aren't selected super fast I need to touch the screen again to display the OSD once more.
Request #1: Make the OSD hiding time a bit longer, or better still make it user configurable (how many milliseconds to display controls before hiding).

2. Next I have to touch the bottom left icon that brings up the audio+subtitle menu overlay.

Issue #2: Somehow in the little time I have to click this icon (before the OSD is hidden), I often seem to miss hitting it properly somehow. I think it activates only if it's hit very accurately.
Request #2: If possible please make the "activation area" of this icon a bit larger so that it's easier to hit and activate quickly.

3. Next I need to hit a small triangle in the Subtitle menu overlay to display the following 3 options - Subtitle delay, Select subtitle file and Download subtitles.

Issue #3: Why are these 3 subtitle menu items, plus 1 audio menu item (Audio delay) hidden by default, requiring extra touches to be made visible every time? Already it takes a bit of effort to display the audio+subtitle menu overlay, so why hide stuff further in there?
Request #3: Obviously remove the hidden audio and subtitle menus and make all 4 items visible by default.

4. Now I need to select Subtitle delay to display another overlay that allows me to increase/decrease the delay in milliseconds.

Issue #4: The arrows allow the delay to be incremented/decremented in steps of 50ms only, which is often not precise enough.
Request #4: If the delay number ("N ms") in the overlay is touched, currently it just hides the overlay. Instead allow manual entry of any positive/negative integer there, and dismiss the overlay only if the user clicks a "Done" or "X" (close) button (this last bit is also relevant to issue #5 below).

5. One extremely useful feature of the subtitle delay overlay is the Voice heard and Text seen buttons.

Issue #5: I focus on a part of the dialog that is clear and a bit isolated so that I can select Voice heard and Text seen for it (whichever occurs first and then whichever occurs second). However it often happens that I'm a bit slow in my reaction and so the delay is not adjusted properly, and I want to redo the adjustment with the same bit of dialog. Unfortunately, the double-tap gesture in the middle of the screen to pause, or the left & right swipe gesture at the bottom of the screen to REW & FF, both serve to immediately hide the subtitle delay overlay. So if one needs to go back (or forward) to some bit of dialog to try the adjustment again using the Voice heard and Text seen buttons, one has to go through the entire process detailed above to display the overlay once more after REWing or FFing to the appropriate point in the video.
Request #5: As mentioned in request #4, dismiss the subtitle delay overlay only if the user explicitly clicks a "Done" or "X" (close) button. Otherwise the overlay should stay visible even when the pause/REW/FF gestures are used.

Thanks for reading and considering these suggestions.

[Aza]

1. Settings > Video > Video player controls hiding delay > Long/Infinite
2. I'll take a look but the zone should be standard
3. On small devices / landscape mode it was not clear where the track list was. So we has to hide the options in a collapsible view.
4. Noted
5. Yes, this is something I noticed too. I'll take a look as well (see https://code.videolan.org/videolan/vlc- ... ssues/2044)

[evadedave]

1. Thanks, this helps a lot.
3. I use a fairly large tablet, so even in landscape mode there is no paucity of screen space. Any possibility of auto-expanding those 2 collapsible menus on devices with sufficient screen height?
4. Thanks, but is there a hidden issue created for this (manual entry/edit of delay in ms)?

[Heat8488]

5. One extremely useful feature of the subtitle delay overlay is the Voice heard and Text seen buttons.

Could somebody explain how I'm supposed to use those buttons? Why is there nothing about them in the Help pages?


Just to help people googling about syncing subtitles, when you know that 1 second=1000 milliseconds, it's not hard at all to sync them manually.

My process is this:

1. Figure which direction they're out of sync.
2. Count the seconds in my head between when the text is on the screen and the line is said(or vice versa).
3. Convert the seconds that its out of sync by in my head to milliseconds and add or subtract that number with the adjustment. I think syncing to the nearest second is sufficient, but if you wanna go to the half second, add or subtract 500ms. For a quarter second, add or subtract 250ms.

There is one big problem though. VLC is counter intuitive. If the subtitles are ahead of the dialog, you have to move the adjustment in the positive direction to sync the subtitles. But logically you should have to move the adjustment into negative numbers. Why is the adjustment from the dialog's perspective? That makes no sense since it's the subtitles that are being adjusted. I keep getting confused by that. Maybe that's the source of confusion for other people too. I figured it out for this post. Hopefully it's burned into my brain now. I figured it out before, but I didn't think about it long enough have it burned into my brain.

Another issue I have is not being able to type in the milliseconds instead of using the < > buttons. I could be thinking of the Windows version, but I'm pretty sure earlier versions of the Android version allowed you to type in the adjustment. I just hate it when developers remove something that works fine for apparent reason, or the version for one OS doesn't have a function that a version for another OS does.

The most important part of this post for me is the Text Seen and Voice Heard buttons. I'd appreciate someone telling me how they work. Thanks

Edit: I just figured out how those buttons work: Which ever occurs first, you press that button, then when the other occurs, you press that button and then the subtitles will be synced. But nowhere on the internet does it say that. I had to use my intuition to figure it out.

[Heat8488]

I just hate it when developers remove something that works fine for apparent reason, or the version for one OS doesn't have a function that a version for another OS does.

That should be for NO apparent reason.