But first, I'm finally "releasing" this program. In fact, there's been a version to download since January 1st but I was asked not to mention it here since it was using the as yet unannounced PB 4 Beta compiler.
I originally created this program in Visual Basic about ... what? 4 years ago or so. To help with subtitling anime. The only other program out at the time was SubStation Alpha. It was clunky to me and I wanted to try and make something better. So I did. Fully graphed audio and video displayed at the same time. It was great. I had users from France, Germany, Russia, Japan, Spain, Italy, etc... In fact, I still get the occasional emails from them regarding the old version. You can even do a Google search for "XombieSub" and see who is using it.
But, it was a dinosaur. I had added so much stuff without a plan that it had become nearly impossible to make it better. So I started from scratch. Still in VB6. That didn't go far. I briefly tried VB.NET but abandoned it quickly. And then for a long time, nothing. Then, something like 2 years ago, I found PureBasic (in fact, almost exactly two years ago this month).
XombieSub was born again. Although it almost wasn't. If PureBasic did not have such a great community, XombieSub would not be working today. zapman*'s audio code was what really got me off the ground again. I had a basic framework of the program but the most important part was missing. I had to be able to graph a wav file so that the user could make selections against the video's audio. So, I spent quite a while modifying his code to get what I needed. Highly modified. Uncompressed wav files for a 25 minute episode can be around 250 mb. zapman's original code loaded the whole file into memory and only displayed a single audio channel. He also used MDI windows for the waveform and several other things that just weren't needed and couldn't be used. I ripped it apart and examined how everything worked. Then I rebuilt it. I'm not afraid to say that without his code, I wouldn't have figured it out. I spent a lot of time trying to understand how wav files could be deciphered and displayed. And then finally, I got it. Using an image instead of windows, "compressing" the 250 mb audio down into 5-10 mb and adding in everything I needed. I was so happy. That was when I finally realized I could do it. I didn't need to depend on activex objects from 3rd parties. I could do everything internal.
I owe a lot to PureBasic and it's community. Fred has been an exceptional person to deal with. I was shocked when he actually talked to me for the first time in the IRC channel. As silly as that sounds, think about how many other language developers will take the time to actually help you through some problems. And he helped a lot. And not just Fred but the whole community. The amount of helpful people and huge amount of example code floating around was extremely helpful. I learned so much. Before I started playing around with PB, I had no idea about the Windows API, memory usage, pointers, ASM and several other things. PB has trained me and taught me many basic (no pun intended) things that have increased my general programming knowledge greatly. I look at my old code and my recent code and the difference is amazing.
So, first and foremost, thanks to Fred. You and your excellent language have helped me in more ways than one. Being able to complete XombieSub is just one of them. For me, working with PureBasic has been an instructional experience. Reading the forum posts and talking to the users has taught me so much about programming. I'm thankful.
Now on to XombieSub. This is extremely beta. There's a huge amount of code (I believe 20,000+ lines) and large parts of it have still not been well tested. A lot of features are still not complete. This is very much a work in progress.
The basic idea is that you have a video file. Currently only avi is supported. Now, you take some program like VirtualDub and you extract the uncompressed wav file from the video. You open both of those with XombieSub and you're ready to start "timing". In this case you would make selections on the audio, type in some text and save the line. You can also import a plain text translated script and then time those lines individually. As you're making selections on the audio, you should notice the video changes to keep up to the most current selection. Also, you may notice red vertical lines in the audio. These mark key frames from the video and are usually for scene changes. This makes it easy to end a particular line before the next scene begins.
There's a wealth of other options but, honestly, I don't see too many people here using the program. I mainly just wanted to say, hey, look - the program that originally got me started on PB is done.
And, I dunno, maybe Fred can add this screenshot...
http://www.seijin.net/Images/video.png
...to the "applications" section of the PB website. I think it's quite nice.
I will eventually work up some kind of documentation for the program. Most likely after a few more versions when it's much more stable. Working on this has been a love/hate relationship. It's an old program that I'm very proud of so I love it but it sucks up so much time that I kind of hate it. There are a lot of people that were waiting for this new version and I feel pressure from them because it's taken so long.
Also, there will never be a code release for this program. Sorry. However, a lot of my code snippets that I post here in the forum are because of XombieSub. I'd say 80% of them
So I kind of did release a lot of the code for it. Just not in an cohesive form.Anyway, the main project is on my website at http://www.seijin.net
Just keep in mind that it will probably crash on you and/or you will probably be confused and lost as to what something does.
I need to make the purpose of the program more clear. It's a script editor, not video editor. It can load/save subtitle scripts but not physically modify the video to hard code the subtitles. Originally created for my anime subtitling group and only for creating soft subs. However, I've also had people use it just for karaoke style text as it has a karaoke editing feature. The program makes extensive use of the TextSub filter from Gabest (I think it's been renamed to vsfilter these days) and includes a lot of the commands from the filter - including the karaoke stuff.
