The topic of creating subtitles with Free Software has often come up in my circles of Emacs-oriented users, and I haven't had a good recommendation to share, until this idea hit me the other day.
Subtitle files are largely blocks of start/end time associated with blocks of text. I figured, once you got a transcript, existing Emacs Org Mode features could be used, perhaps along with keyboard macros, to turn the transcript into a synced subtitle file.
I figured you'd play the video at normal speed, and use a keyboard macro (or some emacs-lisp) to insert line breaks, clock-out the text fragment up to the current point, and clock-in for the next text fragment.
Alas, Org Mode's clock-in/clock-out timestamps have a precision of a minute, rather than sub-second, so that won't do.
Org Mode Timers are a better fit, but their 1-second precision is still too coarse.
I guess some Emacs Lisp to format and insert line breaks and finer-grained timestamps might be a better fit.
So I just wrote it up (GPLv3), and I was quite content with the workflow it enables!
So blong,