How to add subtitles in other places

Question

I've seen some videos where there are signs written in another language, and right next to the sign a subtitle has been added to explain what it says. So far I have only been able to add subtitles to the bottom of a video. How can I add subtitles to other areas of the video?

Answer 1

Advanced SubStation Alpha supports placing subtitles at any position, angle, size, and font.

Answer 2

Were the subs in those videos hardcoded? If they were then it was just a text overlay added in a video editor application.

If they were a separate file, then you could use an editor to examine the subtitle line. Some formats have the ability to position subs, although not all players may support this.

eg. For SRT: http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=470941#post470941

A brief description of the SRT format:

The format has no header, and no footer. Each subtitle has four parts:

Line 1 is a sequential count of subtitles, starting with 1.

Line 2 is the start timecode, followed by the string " --> ", followed by the end timecode. Timecodes are in the format HH:MM:SS,MIL (hours, minutes, seconds, milliseconds). The end timecode can optionally be followed by display coordinates (example " X1:100 X2:600 Y1:050 Y2:100"). Without coordinates displayed, each line of the subtitle will be centered and the block will appear at the bottom of the screen.

Lines 3 onward are the text of the subtitle. New lines are indicated by new lines (i.e. there's no "\n" code). The only formatting accepted are the following:

<b>text</b>: put text in boldface
<i>text</i>: put text in italics
<u>text</u>: underline text <font
color="#00ff00">text</font>: apply green color formatting to the text
  (you can use the font tag only to change color)

Tags can be combined (and should be nested properly). Note that the SubRip code appears to prefer whole-line formatting (no underlining just one word in the middle of a line).

Finally, successive subtitles are separated from each other by blank lines.