Friday, March 09, 2007

The geekiest thing I’ve done in years

this has nothing to do with the diet. Ive been watching the DVD of the IT Crowd. It’s a British comedy that is apparently coming to the US in June of 2007, much like they did with The Office. At any rate, they have normal english subtitles and Uber Geek ones. One has funny inside jokes that only computer geeks would get, another has each letter of the text shifted by 13 places (ROT13), another has all the words for the subtitles sorted in alphabetical order. The 4th episode starts off like this:

Content-Disposition: attachment;
filename=’’TheRedDoor.asc’’
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
KFJveSBodW1zICJBbm90aGVyIEJyaWNrIGluIH

and it just has seemingly random text for the rest of the show. Sitting around yesterday I realized that I could run the subtitles through an Optical Character Recognition program made for subtitle extraction and then I could put that through a base64 decoder - and finally end up with some sort of file. A file attached into video as subtitles - that’s cool. So I did it. The extraction thing goes through the subtitle images (352 of them in this case) and when it comes upon a letter it hasn’t seen yet it asks you to tell it what letter it has highlighted. Starting out you have to type a lot but it starts hitting letters it’s already seen. Eventually you end up with a text file (which I’ve attached here). Then I had to remove the subtitle ID# and time indexes and ended up with the encoded text (here). Ran it through a decoder and found that there was a duplicated line, took that out.... and got the file!

So what was the magic file attached in the subtitles?  cool image? a sound clip? It ended up being about 15KB - could be any number of things.

It was the subtitles. Just the subtitles. The English ones. Yes I spent the better part of a half hour decoding the same text as was on the other subtitle stream (but with Unix line feeds). That kinda sucked. I invite the team that will eventually do the DVD of the US version, or the team that will do the DVD of the 2nd season of the UK version to not just wimp out and attach the text. Give us a sound clip of Jan saying “have you tried turning it off and back on again” or something.

“Buy more ovaltine”

Ok. I’m done.

Posted by chris on 03/09 at 10:42 AM
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