In this tutorial we will learn how to add permanent subtitles in Urdu language to your video files. It is extremely simple to create subtitles in text based formats such as SubRip or .srt. Unfortunately srt format does not support utf-8 characters. You can create an srt file with utf-8 characters but you will not be able to get Urdu characters displayed properly on standalone video and dvd players. Also srt does not support styling and in order to display Urdu properly we need to make sure that the text is displayed in an Urdu font. The best solution to overcome these problems is to hardsub our video files which means that subtitles are added as a permenant layer on the video and they can not be turned off. But the good thing is that we get readable, reasonably attractive Urdu text, displayed just the way we wanted and it can be played anywhere.
To do this you will need some tools. We are using only free tools here which you can easily download and install on your computer.
Another important thing to be noticed is that this procedure works for video files in AVI format. If you don’t have your video in AVI format there are tools to convert video to AVI format. There are also some programs that can let you burn your DVD videos to your hard disk and recode them on the fly to AVI format.
To demonstrate the procedure, I am using a short movie called “Main aur Mera (Me and Mine)” produced and directed by Raheel Lakhani.
First of all you need to create subtitles for your video. Aegisub is the greatest tool to do that. Open Aegisub and start creating new subtitle by pressing CTRL + N or from menu File > Create New. Then open your video file from menu Video > Open Video.
Aegisub has styling support where we decide the font we will be using for this subtitle file, the font size, text-alignment and other styling elements. So go to Subtitles > Style Manager. Create a new style name it Urdu and write some Urdu text. You can also delete/rename the “Default” style and rename Urdu to Default. Save your subtitles file in .ass format. This is the default format in which Aegisub saves subtitles.
Once you are finished editing/creating your subtitles. The next step is to embed these subtitles on your video. This procedure is called hardsubbing.
Open VirtualDub and then open the video file. After that go to Video > Filters and press the Add button. Now scroll down to select Textsub filter and press Ok. After that you will be asked to provide the location of your subtitles file. Select your subtitles file and then press Open. Now go to File > Preview Filtered to check if the preview displays your video correctly.
After that go to Video > Compression to select the compression for your video. For this you need to select a compression format that meets your needs. I used DivX 6.8 Codec (2 logical CPUs) for this video. After selecting the compression codec press Ok and then go to File > Save as AVI. You will be asked where to save your video and what name you would like to give to your video file. After that the compression will begin. During this process you will be able to see a preview of your filtered video as well as original video. On the progress window you will be able to see the projected file size. If the projected file size is insanely large then it means you haven’t selected the right compression format for your video. Abort the procedure and go to Video > Compression to select a different compression format.
This tutorial is written for Urdu language but using the same procedure you can hardsub subtitles on your video in any language in UTF.8 format. Please let me know if you tried this solution and faced some problem, together we can improve this tutorial and make things easier for other people who want to hardsub their video files in many other languages of the world.
Google recently updated Terms and Conditions for Adsense program policies. I usually don’t spend much time reading these, but this time they announced something that got me worried.
We’ve also added some specific requirements that make it necessary for publishers to post and abide by a transparent privacy policy that users see. According to this policy, publishers must notify their users of the use of cookies and/or web beacons to collect data in the ad serving process. This change relates to advertisers’ use of innovative products and features like Gadget Ads and other offerings in the future.
I created three pages for my three different blogs and made sure that the link to the privacy policy page is displayed clearly on all my pages. But since this blog is hosted on Blogger, I wasn’t sure if I needed a privacy policy here. But then I thought that there is no harm adding one here aswell.
I never knew that there is such a good video editing software bundled in Windows XP. I don’t use Windows, I use Ubuntu Linux but unfortunately I was not able to find a video editing tool for Linux that meets my need. There is plenty of video editing tools for Linux but none of them helped me do what I wanted to do. I wanted to add subtitles in Urdu language.
Windows Movie Maker not only has an excellent support for adding text to your videos, it also supports RTL languages such as Urdu, Arabic and Hebrew. However you must have the language support enabled with your operating system. If you can write text in these languages using Notepad then it means you already have this support enabled. Otherwise you will have to enable it by changing settings in Control Panel > Regional and Languages Options.
Windows Movie Maker is a basic video editing tool. It allows you to add titles, subtitles, captions to your videos. It also allows you to trim unwanted portions, Rearrange clips by using simple cut, copy and paste menus, add or remove videos, images and other media. It also gives you the power to add simple video effects to your video.
However there are several things I didn’t like about Windows Movie Maker. For example, when I added subtitles it does not create subtitles in standard formats such as vobsub, srt, and others which could be saved as separate files and then embedded in DVD video. This method would have given power to viewers to turn off subtitles. Now in the video I created with Windows Movie Maker there is no option to turn off subtitles.
Secondly Windows Movie Maker does not have support to create VCDs, DVDs that would play on any popular DVD player. However, you can do that using third party software. You will have to first save your project as a high quality video and then use some other software to create a DVD or VCD. I used Nero 8 for that.
Does any body know any software that could help me creating subtitles in Urdu and save them in standard .sub format?
I use Ubuntu Linux and I am not a huge fan of OpenOffice.org the office that comes with most Linux distributions. I find Google docs a lot more convenient and useful. The reasons are obvious.
It is way much easier to share documents with Google docs than with Open Office. I don’t have to worry about making back up of my documents when I am upgrading my system or installing some new exciting Linux distro.
I was curious to find out if there are any people using Google docs to write novels, thesis and other documents where you have to format lots of pages and it becomes difficult to maintain the consistency. I didn’t find this information instead I found a very interesting video. Its called “Google Docs in Plain English”. Common Craft is the company behind this video they made it for Google. Common Craft is a company consist of two people Sachi LeFever and Lee LeFever. They make videos in a format they call Paperworks. You can look at more of their work on the Common Craft Show.
I was looking for some way to automatically shutdown my Windows XP PC at a scheduled time. I am just an average computer user and had no idea how to do this. I knew about a utility “Scheduled Tasks” that comes with Windows XP but didn’t know how to use it to remotely shutdown my computer on a given time. I found an easy way to do this by searching Google and with a little practice.
Lets say you want to shutdown your computer after an hour. Here is how you can do it:
Step 1: Go to Control Panel > Scheduled Tasks. Double Clicking the Scheduled Tasks button opens a window that looks like this:
Step 2: Double Click on “Add Scheduled Task“. Scheduled Task Wizard begins. Click on Next, now you will be seeing a list of programs on your computer. Shutdown.exe is a command line utility (it also has a GUI that could be triggered from command line) to shutdown or restart a remote or local computer running Windows NT/ Windows 2000 or Windows XP. We will be using this program to run on a given time. It is not listed in the list of programs that you see by default in the wizard. So click on the Browse button. The shutdown.exe program is located in System32 folder, which is usually located at C:\Windows\system32\shutdown.exe. Once you have selected shutdown.exe the wizard will move on to the next step which looks like this:
Here you will select a routine for your Scheduled Task. If you want your computer to shutdown at the same time daily, monthly, weekly, or just this one time only. Select the appropriate answer and click Next. The wizard will now ask you to select a time and day for this task to start. In this example we will be shutting down our computer after one hour. We set the time and date and hit the Next button. In the next screen you will be asked for a username and password for the account on your computer which has the privilege to run such tasks. Provide your username and password and then press Next. The wizard will now inform you that you have successfully scheduled the following task. Followed by the Task’s title, date and time. You need to check the box with “Select advanced properties for this task when I click finish” and then press Finish. Now the wizard will close itself and open the window for advanced properties for the task.
Step 3: In the advanced properties window’s Task tab there is a feild Run where you see your shutdown.exe program’s location like this:
Press the Apply button and you will be asked for username and password again. Done now and you have made a schedule task for your computer to shutdown after 60 minutes.
The web is so full of how to articles. But there is one place that you must know about. Its wikiHow, the how-to manual that everyone can read and write.
wikiHow is a wiki, which is a web site that anyone can write and anyone can edit. Any visitor to wikiHow can create a new page to write about how to do something. Once the page is submitted, any other visitor can edit, improve, or change the page. Over time, the quality of the page rises as many people make improvements. To see for yourself how pages improve, view this time lapse edit revision reel of an actual article. All changes on the site are displayed on “recent changes” and also in the “page history” of each specific article. wikiHow works because we trust our users to behave in a manner which helps others. As a result, our users quickly remove vandalism, nonsense, and material that is inappropriate for our how-to manual.
Sometime ago I was crazily attempting to get a better pagerank on Google. Unfortunately despite all the links I was getting (I thought they were relevant links too), they were not enough for a better pagerank. I gave up the idea of improving page rank.
Now I had some free time, previously I spent this time in link exchange requests. Now I was free to use this time to write and pay attention on what other people are writing on the topics that interest me. I got closer to some bloggers who shared my interests.
Two months later I checked that I have a page rank of 5 for my ubuntu blog. What happened there is that some people who also wrote about Ubuntu linked some of my posts. One or may be two links and they added great value to my pagerank. Since I had already given up on the pagerank thing, I have decided that I will not pay any attention to the pagerank. I will try to focus on writing posts that are informative and useful for visitors of my blogs. Many of them are bloggers, every one is a blogger these days. Linkbacks will come along with the visitors and pagerank… Seriously why would I care about pagerank when I will have the visitors who are already looking for my content and who are already eager to share it with others.
Webcredible is a web usability and accessibility consultancy. Being a blogger, I have an interest in web usabitlity and thats why I am a subscriber of Webcredible monthly newsletter. This month’s issue had a link to U.S. Government’s usability website. This website has huge information about usability. I have seen this website many times before and have read their Writing for the Web article. Still the ideas presented in this article appear so fresh and new to me. It is a simple guide to teach you the ways to improve your web content.
Templates save you time. For example if your daily work routine requires you to write letters to different people many times a day, then it would be wise to create a template for letters. A template that automatically inserts date and time, contact information, and other data that you include in each letter. You can use the template to define a layout, fonts and other formatting rules for your letter.
Open Office templates are easy to create, organize and use. In this quick tutorial we try to learn how to create a template that adds a header and footer on every page. With header containing the document title and footer displaying the page number. We will also select different fonts for Heading1 and Text body of the document.
Start Open Office Writer and then go to File > New > Documents and Templates.
Select New Document > Text Document and press the Open button.This opens a new empty file which is a like a canvas where we are going to draw our template.
Now we will change Style and Formatting. To open the Style and Formatting dialog box you can press Style and Formatting button or go to Format > Style and Formatting or simply press F11 button on your keyboard. A dialog box appears that look like this:
Figure 1: Styles and Formatting Dialog Box.
This is the place where you set the formatting rules for different elements in your document. Select Text Body right click and then select modify. This opens a new dialog box that looks like this:
Figure 2: Dialog box to modify style element Paragraph’s properties.
Here you can change the font. We want our normal text to appear in Arial so we change the font to Arial and then we press the Ok button.
Now we return to the Styles and Formating dialog box. At the bottom there is a drop down combo box (See Figure 1) click on it and select All Styles. Doing this displays all the available styles that you can modify.
Now we click on Header, right click and select Modify to change the formatting of how our header looks like. Then we repeat the process with Footer and Heading 1.
Close the Styles and Formatting dialog box window and return to the empty Untitled document.
Now go to Insert > Header and select Default. Then go to Insert > Footer and select Default. Doing this will add Header and Footer to your empty document’s pages.
Now click on the header box and then go to Insert > Fields and select Title. Doing this automatically adds the Title of the Document in Header.
Then click on the footer box that appears at the bottom of your empty page. Go to Insert > Fields and select Page Number. Doing this adds a page number on the footer of every page that uses this template.
Now we will save the template. Go to File > Templates and select Save. This opens a dialog box (See figure 3 below). Give a name to your template in the New Template feild we named our template SampleTemplate2 in this example . Select a category from the Categories list, we use My Templates in this example and press Ok button.
Figure 3: Showing Save Template Dialog Box
Now go to File > Close and a warning box would appear asking you to Save or Discard changes. Click on Discard changes. Don’t worry, your template is already saved.
Now we are going to learn how to use this template to create new documents.
Go to File > New > Documents and Templates. Choose Templates tab in the Templates and Document dialog box that now appears before you. There you will see your template Categories. We saved our template in My Templates, so we double click My Templates. This shows templates in my templates category and our template SampleTemplate2 is there. Select it and press Open button.
Go to File > Properties which opens a dialog box for your new untitled document. Click on Description tab and give your document a Title. You will notice that the title automatically appears in the Header feild. Scroll down and you will also notice the page number appearing at the bottom of the page.
This was just an introductory tutorial. Now you can play around and create as many templates as you want. You will gain expertise with each new template, and remeber there are endless possibilities to what you can do with the power of templates in Open Office. You can also download ready made Open Office templates from Tutorials For OpenOffice website.
I can not find any thing that allows a user to set page margins. Instead there is a little hack to do that by using tables. Go to Insert > Table and add a table. The ideal wrap up table contains three rows and single column. You can not set margins there but you can set the width of the table. In this sample document I used a table width of 90%.
Choose to align center in the Layout section if you wish your table to appear in the center with 5% margins at both sides.
After that we add our content in middle cell of the table.
Another layout could be adding a single row and single column table at the top, then a three column and single row table in the middle. In the three column table change cells one by one to set their width. More easier would be to go into HTML mode and change 33% to 5%,90% and 5%. (See sample document 2).
