A format used to hold bitmapped subtitles for films on Blu-Ray disks. After ripping a Blu-Ray film to disk using something like makemkv, the subtitle track can be extracted to the Sup format using mkvtoolnix.

The format is described here, and also here.

It'll be nice to be able to convert Japanese subtitles in SUP format to be English subtitles in SRT format. A possible approach is to first convert the SUP Japanese subtitles to be a set of PNG files for the subtitles, and a SRT file which has the filenames instead of the text. An experimental Java program to do this - SupExtract.

Next step is to use OCR (optical character recognition) on those PNG images to convert them to Japanese text. Nuance Omnipage Ultimate worked surprisingly well when I tried it on some sample files. But is a commercial product.

So far so good. Let's say we now have a SRT file with names of .PNG files for the text, and a set of parallel named .TXT files containing the scanned OCR text. We can run each OCR text through Google Translate using a script like srt_merge_txt.rb srt_merge_txt.rb. The hiccup is while Google Translate is free, and it does an amazing job, the subtitles are for something like Japanese rather chaotic.