How can I read subtitles on my smart phone while in a Chinese movie theater in China?

November 11, 2012 1:25 AM

How can I read subtitles on my smart phone while in a Chinese movie theater in China?

i'm going to see the film "cold war" here in China tonight.

It's in Chinese, and I'd like to bring subtitles in English on my smart phone, so i can scroll through and see what they are saying.. Is there any convenient way to do this? I'd also like to do it with other movies in the future. (the theater is almost empty and i'm sitting in the back row)

posted by crawltopslow to computers & internet (9 answers total)

What is the OS on the phone? That will help people help you find apps. I take it you've already searched the relevant app store, though.

See if you can google around and find a subtitle file for the film. As far as I know it'll be a .srt file. Open that file in a text editor on your computer, and then save the text file to a format that your smartphone can read - pdf or whatever works.

It seems like it be nice to find an app that can "play" the subtitles along with the film. Or find a copy of the film with subtitles, and play it simultaneously. That way, you don't have to scroll through manually, and you don't run the risk of getting off track.
posted by victory_laser at 2:26 AM on November 11, 2012

I would probably choose anything that is based on MPlayer, by far the most versatile player for Nix machines. If you use Android, there's a port available for it, and, AFAIK, as well as for iPhones.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vnd.mplayer.neon&feature=search_result#?t=W251bGwsMSwxLDEsImNvbS52bmQubXBsYXllci5uZW9uIl0.
posted by stthspl at 3:10 AM on November 11, 2012

Probably the easiest solution would be to play a copy of the movie simultaneously on your phone with either hard-coded subtitles or an english dub.
posted by hobo gitano de queretaro at 3:29 AM on November 11, 2012

Um... Wouldn't that be annoying to other people?
posted by jpburns at 5:40 AM on November 11, 2012 [7 favorites]

For the iPhone, I use the app "subtitles" which plays back synced subtitles that it downloads from the web (opensubtitles.org). Don't see "cold war", so your first step is to find an srt with the data you need...
posted by tintexas at 5:50 AM on November 11, 2012

I'm on android.. and most of the movies I will be seeing will be in the movie theatre, so I imagine that finding subtitles SRT file will be difficult sometimes...
posted by crawltopslow at 6:02 AM on November 11, 2012

Yeah I can't find the SRT file for cold war, but I found a torrent that has the whole video, with the subtitles hard encoded...
posted by crawltopslow at 6:30 AM on November 11, 2012

Look into Gnapi. I've not used it but it's designed specifically for Android.
posted by Emperor SnooKloze at 7:06 AM on November 11, 2012

Um... Wouldn't that be annoying to other people?

Not in China :)
posted by bearette at 8:09 AM on November 11, 2012