A command-line tool for language-agnostic automatic synchronization of subtitles with video, so that subtitles are aligned to the correct starting point within the video.
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First, make sure ffmpeg is installed:
On macOS:
On Linux (Ubuntu/Debian):
sudo apt update
sudo apt install ffmpeg
On Linux (CentOS/RHEL/Fedora):
sudo dnf install ffmpeg
# or for older versions: sudo yum install ffmpeg
Recommended Installation (pipx)
The recommended way to install ffsubsync is using pipx, which installs the package in an isolated environment and makes the CLI commands globally available:
If you don't have pipx installed, you can install it first:
Alternative Installation (pip)You can also install using pip (requires Python >= 3.8):
pip install git+https://github.com/tinof/ffsubsync@latest
For the latest development version:
pipx install git+https://github.com/tinof/ffsubsync@latest
Note: This tool supports Linux and macOS only. Windows is not supported.
After installation, three CLI commands are available: ffs
, subsync
, and ffsubsync
(all are equivalent):
Basic synchronization with video:
ffs video.mp4 -i unsynchronized.srt -o synchronized.srt
Using any of the three command aliases:
subsync video.mp4 -i unsynchronized.srt -o synchronized.srt
ffsubsync video.mp4 -i unsynchronized.srt -o synchronized.srt
Synchronization using reference subtitles: There may be occasions where you have a correctly synchronized srt file in a language you are unfamiliar with, as well as an unsynchronized srt file in your native language. In this case, you can use the correctly synchronized srt file directly as a reference for synchronization, instead of using the video as the reference:
ffs reference.srt -i unsynchronized.srt -o synchronized.srt
Running as a Python module:
python -m ffsubsync video.mp4 -i unsynchronized.srt -o synchronized.srt
The tool uses the file extension to decide whether to perform voice activity detection on the audio or to directly extract speech from an srt file.
This tool is designed for command-line usage and supports:
Note: Windows is not supported in this version. The tool is optimized for Unix-like systems.
If the sync fails, the following recourses are available:
--no-fix-framerate
;--gss
to use golden-section search to find the optimal ratio between video and subtitle framerates (by default, only a few common ratios are evaluated);--max-offset-seconds
greater than the default of 60, in the event that the subtitles are out of sync by more than 60 seconds (empirically unlikely in practice, but possible).--vad=auditok
since auditok can sometimes work better in the case of low-quality audio than WebRTC's VAD. Auditok does not specifically detect voice, but instead detects all audio; this property can yield suboptimal syncing behavior when a proper VAD can work well, but can be effective in some cases.If the sync still fails, consider trying one of the following similar tools:
ffsubsync
usually finishes in 20 to 30 seconds, depending on the length of the video. The most expensive step is actually extraction of raw audio. If you already have a correctly synchronized "reference" srt file (in which case audio extraction can be skipped), ffsubsync
typically runs in less than a second.
The synchronization algorithm operates in 3 steps:
The best-scoring alignment from step 3 determines how to offset the subtitles in time so that they are properly synced with the video. Because the binary strings are fairly long (millions of digits for video longer than an hour), the naive O(n^2) strategy for scoring all alignments is unacceptable. Instead, we use the fact that "scoring all alignments" is a convolution operation and can be implemented with the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), bringing the complexity down to O(n log n).
In most cases, inconsistencies between video and subtitles occur when starting or ending segments present in video are not present in subtitles, or vice versa. This can occur, for example, when a TV episode recap in the subtitles was pruned from video. FFsubsync typically works well in these cases, and in my experience this covers >95% of use cases. Handling breaks and splits outside of the beginning and ending segments is left to future work (see below).
Besides general stability and usability improvements, one line of work aims to extend the synchronization algorithm to handle splits / breaks in the middle of video not present in subtitles (or vice versa). Developing a robust solution will take some time (assuming one is possible). See #10 for more details.
The implementation for this project was started during HackIllinois 2019, for which it received an Honorable Mention (ranked in the top 5 projects, excluding projects that won company-specific prizes).
This project would not be possible without the following libraries:
Code in this project is MIT licensed.
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