SUMMARY Subtitle Composer does not seem to work with SAMI/.smi subtitles at all. I cannot load such files, nor can I find any documentation of SAMI/.srt subtitle files working with SubtitleComposer. STEPS TO REPRODUCE 1. Try to load a SAMI/.smi file into SubtitleComposer. 2. Select "All files" on the file open dialog to select a valid SAMI/.smi file. OBSERVED RESULT SubtitleComposer file manager does not recognize SAMI/.srt files in any way and forcing a valid SAMI/.srt file to open on SubtitleComposer will not work. The program says it could not recognize the file. EXPECTED RESULT SubtitleComposer file open dialog recognizes a SAMI/.smi file and can open it. SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS Linux/KDE Plasma: Flatpak ADDITIONAL INFORMATION I would have thought this feature would be taken for granted, but I do know that SAMI is a very different format, being in XML and also uniquely using frames instead of time for timing. Still, it is a lot less complex than PGS or VobSub images and OCR. The hardest part is setting frame->timing conversion following a setting for the user to put in the frame rate, right? (Or am I way off and underestimating some Herculean task?) Is this something that could be a milestone in the same way that the web and ATSC XML subtitle format (TTML) will be? I had to fire up an older and dead program (SubtitleEditor) in order to get this converted to basic, old reliable .srt format. Eventually, bit-rot will set in and the program will not run for one reason or another. Subtitle-Composer has much better foundations and growth potential and is actually in active development, but no SAMI? For some reason, Koreans fell in love with SAMI/.smi long ago. They latched onto the greatest and latest program or format that was available on Windows in 1999 ... and didn't let go. There are many, many subtitles in the Korean language (and some in the English language) for content made in Korea, and many Korean subtitles for foreign content out in the wild. Very, very many SAMI/.smi subtitles are both in circulation and popping up for new content more often than not. I wish we could consign SAMI/.smi to the dustbin of history, but if we want to be able to open up old files out there with a program that runs on current operating systems, then we need SAMI/.srt support. I do not watch TV shows/soaps/K-Dramas (just movies and I sometimes need the subtitles to understand fast-paced Korean, mumbled Korean, or slang a bit better), but I imagine the fans and fansubbers would appreciate SubtitleComposer handling SAMI.
Thanks for the report. I didn't know SAMI had so much adoption so never gave it a priority. Once the current WebVTT and CSS support/work is done, should be trivial to fully support SAMI subtitle format.
> I didn't know SAMI had so much adoption ... I do remember it not long after it first came out. It was rolled out in 1998/1999, and I occasionally saw it alongside .srt in the very early 2000s (no one was sharing much content over dial-up in the early 1990s). It basically seemed to disappear a few years later. I think for Korea, the Windows-only freeware programs (GOM Player and Daum's Pot Player, formerly "KMPlayer" or "Kang Multimedia Player") supporting SAMI/.smi out of the box was a key part of it. In the early 2000s, many players still had hiccups with the SAMI/.smi format. Remember that on Windows, VLC was not yet a thing and even when it was, it spent several years being a distant third to Media Player Classic and KMPlayer, which came out even earlier. (Additionally, VLC did not properly show SAMI/.smi subtitles until after the format had all but disappeared from several countries, including its point of origin, America.) If you wanted to play DVDs or video files without stuttering, then having a player like KMPlayer was a godsend. KMPlayer spread by word of mouth. GOM Player (which was not quite as good overall, but had some exclusive features and a company backing it) hosted subtitle repositories on its website. The result was that every Korean had one or the other installed in the early 2000s and SAMI/.smi has been entrenched ever since. > Once the current WebVTT and CSS support/work is done, should be trivial to fully support SAMI subtitle format. Thank you kindly. I will upload some sample subtitle files as attachments. You can put them with any old video file to test them.
Created attachment 155030 [details] SAMI/.smi subtitle (UTF-8) #1
Created attachment 155031 [details] SAMI/.smi Subtitle (UTF-8) #0
Created attachment 155032 [details] SAMI/.smi Subtitle (UTF-8) #2
Created attachment 155033 [details] SAMI/.smi Subtitle (UTF-8) #3
Created attachment 155034 [details] SAMI/.smi Subtitle (UTF-8) #4
Created attachment 155035 [details] SAMI/.smi Subtitle (UTF-8) #5
To say that SAMI/.smi is alive and well is an understatement. You see it in multiple languages for Korean and foreign content and subtitles in multiple languages ... at GOM: <https://www.gomlab.com/subtitle/> and at Cineaste: <https://cineaste.co.kr/bbs/main.php?gid=psd>; both of these websites aim at the Korean market and are on Korean websites. The GOM site, to its credit, is a bit bilingual/English-friendly, but beware of broken English, corrupted characters, etc. on the site. (China, Korea, and Japan are the world'sholdouts against Unicode everywhere, with some justification, of course. You will run across about 5% of their websites being not in Unicode or in poorly engineered Unicode. To make things easier, I converted the sample SAMI/.smi subtitle I attached into UTF-8. Most of the time they will be in plain ASCII or in UHC encoding.) I have even seen the occasional SAMI/.smi pop up on SubScene, too: <https://subscene.com/>.