SubPlease🫴: Get Incredibly Accurate Subs for Anything

o.mp4

Generate accurate subtitles from audio, align existing subs to videos, generate your own Kindle's Immersion Reading like audiobook subs.

This tool allows you to use AI models to generate subtitles from only audio, then match the subtitles to an accurate text, like a book. You can also just generate subtitles for videos with it, without needing any existing subtitles. Soon, it will support syncronizing existing subs as well. Currently I am only developing this tool for Japanese use.

It requires a modern GPU with decent VRAM, CPU, and RAM. There's also a communty built Google Colab notebook available on discord.

Current State: The transcript will be extremely accurate. The timings will be mostly accurate, but may come late or leave early. Accuracy has improved tremendously with the latest updates to the AI tooling used.

Support for this tool can be found on KanjiEater's thread on The Moe Way Discord

Support for any tool by KanjiEater can be found on KanjiEater's Discord

Install

Currently supports Windows or unix based OS's like Ubuntu 20.04 on WSL2. Currently only support Japanese without code modification.

Install ffmpeg and make it available on the path
Use python 3.9.9
pip install -r requirements.txt
If you're using a single file for the entire audiobook you are good to go. If you have individually split audio tracks, they need to be combined. You can use the docker image for m4b-tool. Trust me, you want the improved codec's that are included in the docker image. I tested both and noticed a huge drop in sound quality without them. When lossy formats like mp3 are transcoded they lose quality so it's important to use the docker image to retain the best quality.

How to use

Quick Guide

Put an m4b and a txt file in a folder
Run python run.py -d "<full folder path>"

Primarily I'm using this for syncing audiobooks to their book script. So while you could use this for video files, I'm not doing that just yet.

git clone https://github.com/kanjieater/AudiobookTextSync.git
Make sure you run any commands that start with ./ from the project root, eg after you clone you can run cd ./AudiobookTextSync
Setup the folder. Create a folder to hold a single media file (like an audiobook). Name it whatever you name your media file, eg Arslan Senki 7, this is what should go anywhere you see me write <name>
Get the book script as text from a digital copy. Put the script at: ./<name>/script.txt. Everything in this file will show up in your subtitles. So it's important you trim out excess (table of contents, character bios that aren't in the audiobook etc)
Single media file should be in ./<name>/<name>.m4b. If you have the split audiobook as m4b,mp3, or mp4's you can run ./merge.sh "<full folder path>", eg ./merge.sh "/mnt/d/Editing/Audiobooks/ｍｅｄｉｕｍ霊媒探偵城塚翡翠". The split files must be in ./<name>/<name>_merge/. This will merge your file into a single file so it can be processed.
If you have the script.txt and either ./<name>/<name>.m4b, you can now run the GPU intense, time intense, and occasionally CPU intense script part. python run.py -d "<full folder path>" eg python run.py -d "/mnt/d/Editing/Audiobooks/かがみの孤城/". This runs each file to get a word level transcript. It then creates a sub format that can be matched to the script.txt. Each word level subtitle is merged into a phrase level, and your result should be a <name>.srt file that can be watched with MPV, showing audio in time with the full book as a subtitle.
From there, use a texthooker with something like mpv_websocket and enjoy Immersion Reading.

Split m4b by chapter

./split.sh "/mnt/d/Editing/Audiobooks/かがみの孤城/"

Get a subtitle with synced transcript from split files

python run.py -d "/mnt/d/Editing/Audiobooks/かがみの孤城/"

Single File

You can also run for a single file. Beware if it's over 1GB/19hr you need as much as 8GB of RAM available. You need yourm4b, mp3, or mp4 audiobook file to be inside the folder: "", with a txt file in the same folder. The txt file can be named anything as long as it has a txt extension. The -d parameter can multiple audiobooks to process like: python run.py -d "/mnt/d/sync/Harry Potter 1/" "/mnt/d/sync/Harry Potter 2 The Spooky Sequel/"

/sync/
└── /Harry Potter/
   ├── Harry Potter.m4b
   └── Harry Potter.txt
└── /Harry Potter 2 The Spooky Sequel/
   ├── Harry Potter 2 The Spooky Sequel.mp3
   └── script.txt

python run.py -d "<full folder path>" eg python run.py -d "$(wslpath -a "D:\Editing\Audiobooks\かがみの孤城\\")" or python run.py -d "/mnt/d/sync/Harry Potter 1/" "/mnt/d/sync/Harry Potter The Sequel/"

Generate subs for a folder of video or audio file

python gen.py -d "/mnt/u/Videos/J-Shows/MAG Net/"

Merge split files into a single m4b

./merge.sh "/mnt/d/Editing/Audiobooks/ｍｅｄｉｕｍ霊媒探偵城塚翡翠"

Merge split files into a single m4b for a library

This assumes you just have mp4's in a folder like /mnt/d/Editing/Audiobooks/ｍｅｄｉｕｍ霊媒探偵城塚翡翠. It will run all of the folder's with mp4's and do a check on them after to make sure the chapters line up. Requires docker command to be available.

python merge.py "/mnt/d/Editing/Audiobooks/"

What does "bad" look like using the stable-ts library?

At this point I would recommend reading from the texthooker instead of a sub. (CTRL+SHIFT+RIGHT in mpv to set offset as the next sub). Then you can see the next line coming in the texthooker, and not be distracted by subtitle jumps.

Update: The timing is much more accurate, but it still makes sense to show what going wrong could look like

bad.mp4

Anki Support

Generates subs2srs style deck
Imports the deck into Anki automatically

The Anki support currently takes your m4b file in <full_folder_path> named <name>.m4b, where <name> is the name of the media, and it outputs srs audio and a TSV file that can is sent via AnkiConnect to Anki. This is useful for searching across GoldenDict to find sentences that use a word, or to merge automatically with custom scripts (more releases to support this coming hopefully).

Install ankiconnect add-on to Anki.
I recommend using ANKICONNECT as an environment variable. Set export ANKICONNECT=localhost:8755 or export ANKICONNECT="$(hostname).local:8765" in your ~/.zshrc or bashrc & activate it.
Make sure you are in the project directory cd ./AudiobookTextSync
Install pip install ./requirements.txt (only needs to be done once)
Set ANKI_MEDIA_DIR to your anki profile's media path: /mnt/f/Anki2/KanjiEater/collection.media/
Run the command below

Command: ./anki.sh "<full_folder_path>"

Example: ./anki.sh "/mnt/d/sync/kokoro/"

WSL2

If you're using WSL2 there a few networking quirks.

Enable WSL2 to talk to your Windows machine. microsoft/WSL#4585 (comment)
Set your $ANKICONNECT url to your windows machine url, export ANKICONNECT="http://$(hostname).local:8765". microsoft/WSL#5211
Make sure inside of Anki's addon config "webBindAddress": "0.0.0.0", "webBindPort": "8765". 0.0.0.0 binds to all network interfaces, so WSL2 can connect.

Testing connection to Anki from WSL2

curl --header "Content-Type: application/json" \
  --request POST \
  --data '{ "action": "guiBrowse", "version": 6, "params": { "query": "flag:3 is:new -is:suspended -tag:重複 tag:重複3" } }' \
  http://172.18.224.1:8765

Troubleshooting

You might see various issues while trying this out in the early state. Here are some of the pieces at work in sequence:

Stages

Filter down audio to improve future results - slow & probably not heavy cpu or gpu usage. Heavier on cpu
split_run & stable-ts: Starts off heavy on CPU & RAM to identify the audio spectrum
stable-ts: GPU heavy & requires lots of vRAM depending on the model. This is the part with the long taskbar, where it tries to transcribe a text from the audio. Currently the default is tiny. Ironically tiny, does a better job of keeping the phrases short, at the cost of accuracy of transcription, which since we are matching a script, doesn't matter. Also it runs 32x faster than large.
Merge vtt's for split subs
Split the script
match the script to the generated transcription to get good timestamps

Getting Book Scripts

This program supports txt files. You may need to use an external program like Calibre to convert your epub or kindle formats like azw3 to a txt file.

To convert in Calibre:

Right click on the book and convert the individual book (or use the batch option beneath it)
At the top right for output format, select txt
Click Find & Replace. If your book has 《》for furigana as some aozora books do (戦場《せんじょう》), then add a regex. If they have rt for furigana use the rt one: 《(.+?)》 or <rt>(.*?)<\/rt>. When you copy the regex into the regex box, don't forget to click the Add button
You can add multiple regexes to strip any extra content or furigana as need be.
Click ok and convert it & you should now be able to find the file wherever Calibre is saving your books