This show has been flagged as Clean by the host.

We’ll explain why we’re doing it, what it is, and cover some useful tools along the way.

I’ve been watching movies recommended to me by my colleagues.

As I work for a global company, the recommendations are often “Foreign Language”, which by definition is every movie to someone.

It’s often difficult to read the subtitles, or they are distracting from the acting.

So I thought of converting the subtitles to speech for inclusion as an audio track, to produce a Voice Over or Lectoring audio track.

Lectoring aka Voice Over Translations

First used is soviet countries to read the news and propaganda from a lectors - the first podcasts ?

In Polish, lektor is also used to mean “off-screen reader” or “voice-over artist”. A lektor is a (usually male) reader who provides the Polish voice-over on foreign-language programmes and films where the voice-over translation technique is used. This is the standard localization technique on Polish television and (as an option) on many DVDs; full dubbing is generally reserved for children’s material.

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lector#Television

Example: Night of the Living Dead

To give you an idea of what this sounds like I’m going to play you an example of the out of copyright movie, Night of the Living Dead .

In the United States, Night of the Living Dead was mistakenly released into the public domain because the original distributor failed to replace the copyright notice when changing the film’s name

Original

First the original sound track, then the same clip with the voice over track.

Voice Over

Proof of Concept

As a native English speaker I find it difficult to follow those Voice Over tracks as I am trying to focus on the underlying audio. In discussions with Polish friends, it seems that this is not a problem when Polish is your native language. To put that to the test I wanted to try it out on a movie to see if that were indeed the case.

I asked on Mastodon for a non English movie that was Creative Commons but did have English Subtitles, and HPR host Windigo had the answer.

2009 Nasty Old People is a 2009 Swedish film directed by Hanna Sköld, Tangram Film. It premiered on 10 October 2009 at Kontrapunkt in Malmö, and on file sharing site The Pirate Bay. The film is available as an authorized and legal download under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-SA.

So my idea was to take each bit of subtitle text, convert it to audio, then have the generated audio play at the same time the subtitle appears on the screen.

We use piper to process shows here on HPR, and we also generate srt, or SubRip subtitle files for each show.

SRT or SubRip files are the easiest subtitle file to work with.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SubRip<