Milliseconds In Subtitles

A shell script to generate subtitles to display accurate timing (including milliseconds) in videos.

Reference

Kudos to [How to Display Milliseconds in Most Video Players (2010)] (http://graphics.cs.columbia.edu/wiki/doku.php?id=wiki:millisecondsinvideoplayer) by Steve Henderson.

Usage

The script accepts three parameters, in this order:

1. the name of the video file - the subtitles file will be saved in the same location, with the extension replaced with '.srt'
2. the duration of the video in seconds - one subtitle will be generated for each frame of the video over this duration (hint: this file will be large)
3. the frame rate of the video (number of images per second) - each subtitle will display the frame number as well as the time in hh:mm:ss.mmm format.

Example

$ ./srt4fps.sh video.avi 1245 30

Alternative

I am also using the extension [Jump to time] (http://addons.videolan.org/content/show.php/Previous+frame?content=156396) for VLC media player, which displays the current time including milliseconds in a separate window, on the press of a button.

While the subtitles update more frequently, I found, while using VLC on Mac OS X, that they have a tendency to disappear on pause, and are not updated when moving to next frame using the shortcut key E.

In this case, the extension might fill the gap. The timing displayed by subtitles and the extension is consistent, with differences lower than the duration of a single frame.