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[Rande]

After much hunting around for the right tools for the job, I've settled on jubler to compose subtitles.
However, I don't have useful audio to sync to (Just a piano playing as silent movies do.)
It would be nice to be able to sync to visual change.  The existing hardsubs take up a large portion of the screen, so what I'd like is a box on the video, that when the content of the box changes, that indicates the start/end of a subtitle.

I know this wouldn't be very useful to most people, but I thought I'd throw it out there.

[teras]

It is really difficult to set what actually "the visible content changes" mean.
And I think it would be a lot of work, but, as always, patches are welcome ;-)

[Rande]

The easiest way of determining a potential scene change in MPEG2 is an unexpected I-frame. 
Unexpected meaning not the usual 15th frame I-frame.  So if it's 1-14 frames since the last I-Frame, then it'll be considered a scene change.

Another approach that would be quite simple is just Step and Jump Forwards and backwards buttons. Step being say 0.5s and jump being 5s.  So to get to the next scene change, I'd hit Jump Forward until I notice a scene change, and then hit Step Back until I found where it actually changed.  Accurate to 0.5s is something I could live with.
(I will take a look the source and see if I notice an easy way to do this, but I've only ever done servlets in Java, never actually used Swing beyond the book examples.)

[teras]

WHy not manually drag the subtitle, which will automatically update the visuals?

[Rande]

WHy not manually drag the subtitle, which will automatically update the visuals?

I do that already, but it takes several tries to find the scene change.
I'd much rather be spending my time translating than spending 30s per line trying to find the next scene (it very quickly adds up).

Or am I doing it wrong?  Should I just create subs as plain text (without timing info) and somehow add the timing later?

[teras]

You can also do that.
See the FAQ under section "How can I synchronize subtitles from an external file?"

What you can also do, is let mplayer play the movie and type the subtitles on the fly. See FAQ again, under section "How can I create new subtitles while the movie is played?"