Video subtitling for the GNOME desktop

This release features major feature enhancements, as well as bug fixes. This comes as an answer to the great feedback provided by the users.

A new Character Codings dialog was introduced, allowing to choose the encodings to be used for opening and saving subtitles. Its behavior is similar to that of other applications (e.g., gedit). It is opened by selecting "Add or Remove..." in the File Open/Save dialogs.

A new Preferences dialog was also added. Currently it allows to set whether video files are automatically chosen when selecting/opening subtitle files. If you disable it, then selecting a subtitle file in the File Open dialog won't select the corresponding video file.

Regarding video previewing, some users had noticed that incorrect timings were shown, and that Rewind and Forward were not working properly. This was observable by those with a locale that uses a comma as decimal separator (e.g., French, Polish). This was fixed and should work fine now.

Other changes include:

• Store the window size on exit and restore it on start
• Removed the shadow that appeared around the video image frame
• Print an adequate error message when using an encoding not supported by the system
• Properly unselect video file when selecting a folder, in the File Open dialog

Bug fixes:

• Video loaded with wrong length (#418099)
• "System.FormatException" error during opening video (#421457)
• Quote symbol in path prevents file from opening (#417868)
• Video file is reported as not supported but MPlayer supports it (#417848)
• Video previewing doesn't function correctly (#421883)

Thanks:

• Carlos Doki, Malte Skoruppa, Marcin Zajaczkowski, Phalanx747, Rafal Slubowski, Sebastian Porta

Great news to the project. An article on Gnome Subtitles appears in the latest issue of Linux Pratique, a French magazine released every 2 months. This 2-page article covers many things that can be done with Gnome Subtitles, as well as some basics of working with subtitle files. A thumbnail version is available (Gnome Subtitles is in pages 26 and 27).

This release covers some bugs that were quickly reported. Changes:

• Now builds with gtk-sharp 2.8 again
• Added the *.txt pattern to the "All Subtitle Files" filter, in the File Open dialog
• Print the stack trace to the console when an unknown exception is found while opening a file

Bug fixes:

• Application crashes at exit when MPlayer has already finished (#416895)

Thanks to:

• Marcin Zajaczkowski, for the feedback

Users having problems on File Open may want to run gnome-subtitles from a terminal to check the printed error messages.

At last, video subtitling with built-in previewing is a reality for GNOME users. After a long development cycle, a first version of video previewing is now available. MPlayer was used as the backend and must be installed in order for playback to work. MPlayer was chosen because it supports most of the existing video files, although its integration with other applications has its limits and as such GStreamer and Xine integration are planned for the future. Here's a fresh screenshot:

The video's current position and length are shown to the left. Next to them are two new buttons, which allow to set the subtitle Start and End times to the current video position. This simplifies both adjusting existing subtitles and creating new subtitles from scratch. Double-clicking a subtitle moves the video position to its Start time.

The File Open dialog was also improved, allowing to select video files. Entering a folder automatically populates the list of video files with the videos in that dir. A video file is automatically selected if it matches the selected subtitle file. This allows to easily open a subtitle file together with its video file. File type filters were also added.

The whole project had a major refactoring, which resulted in much more manageable code. The Main window is now a Gtk.Window instead of a Gnome.App, making the Gnome-sharp dependency being now used in very few things. Widget names were reviewed and renamed, and every dialog and window is now in a separate glade file.

Bug fixes include:

• App crashes when selection float value with , as a decimal separator (#402201)

Finally, many thanks to Stefan A. Keel (Sak), who once again provided with great artwork for the new icons, being of great help to the project.

A package for Debian users is now available, thanks to the contribution of Senthil Kumaran S.

This package was created for Debian Etch, but should work for other versions too.

The name of the project in sourceforge has changed from "gsubtitles" to "gnome-subtitles". Therefore, the existing services were also changed to the new name. This includes the website, Subversion repository, mailing lists and forums.

Please update your bookmarks. The new address is now http://gnome-subtitles.sf.net.

This release brings you the result of a major internal refactoring and some useful changes:

• Added find/replace functionality, including searching with regular expressions
• New artwork by Stefan A. Keel (Sak)
• New keyboard shortcuts for the most used features (see the complete list on the Help page):
  • Undo - Ctrl+Z
  • Redo - Shift+Ctrl+Z or Ctrl+Y
  • Insert Subtitle Before - Shift+Ctrl+Return
  • Insert Subtitle After - Ctrl+Return
  • Find - Ctrl+F
  • Find Previous - Shift+Ctrl+G or Shift+F3
  • Find Next - Ctrl+G or F3
  • Replace - Ctrl+H
  • Help contents - F1
• Now works with the latest mono and gtk-sharp versions
• Updated the way subtitles are selected, focused and scrolled, should have a more natural feel now
• Major global refactoring
• When using "Save As", the current timing mode is updated to that of the new subtitle format

Bug fixes:

• Find and Replace option (#363410)
• "Save as" not working (#382278)
• Close button in "About" window does not work (#383797)
• Ctrl+Up/Down now scrolls too besides selecting the previous/next subtitle

The Find/Replace dialog.

Thanks to Stefan A. Keel, all artwork included in Gnome Subtitles has been renewed. This includes the application's icons and about dialog, as well as the website's logo and favicon. More information and sample images are available on his blog post.

Arch Linux users now have an easier way to install Gnome Subtitles in their preferred distro. Credits go to Hugo Doria and Douglas Soares de Andrade for their great work on this.

A list of keyboard shortcuts to be used in the upcoming version of Gnome Subtitles is available.