There is a library near where I live with a huge collection of Chinese DVDs, but it seems that none of them have Chinese captions, and they only have English subtitles.

This isn't bad, but it would be much better for me to watch them with Chinese captions. Does anyone have any solutions for this, such as how I can find transcripts of various films?

You can look at http://www.opensubtitles.org/ or http://subscene.com/ for subtitles (there are many more sites, but I only use these). You need a little bit of luck to find exactly what you're looking for, though. BluRay and DVD don't have the exact same frame rate, so make sure you download the subs from the right rip, and check your player for offsets.

A great site to check for Chinese subs is http://shooter.cn - often has several versions in simplified, traditional, or both

If your subs have frame rate or offset problems, these are easily fixable with the right freely available software.

I try to find Chinese movies in versions with dual language subs, and I've made a few dual language subs of my own that I will get around to sharing sometime.

Whoa, nice! Thanks for the link :)

I'm assuming you are outside of China? There are quite a few Chinese films and TV shows on YouTube if you do some digging. They tend to only have Chinese subtitles.

@Alan thanks for the link. I'll give this a try. Now, suppose I download one of a film's subtitles, how can I get them to display as the movie is being played? Do I just play the movie and the click on the the thing I downloaded from shooter ?

With movies that have been ripped to a file, usually renaming the subtitle file and placing I alongside the movie will associate the toe together, so if you have a movie called MyMovie.mp4 and SRT format subtitles, you name your subtitles MyMovie.srt (or MyMovir.chs.srt if you want to remind yourself that they are simplified Chinese) and place them alongside the movie.

I'm not sure if this renaming of subtitles works with DVDs though, so you probably want to use a media player such as VLC or Media Player Classic which gives you a bit of control over which subtitles to display. Open the DVD in the media player, and then select the subtitles.

Oh one other thing,-if you have code page problems (garbage characters) then the best solution is to open the subtitles file in an advanced text editor such as Notepad++, select "Encoding->Character sets->Chinese->Big5" for Traditional or "->GB2312" for simplified (the hanzi should now be readable), then select "Encoding->Convert to UTF-8", and save the file again. UTF-8 is a Unicode encoding which means that has the advantage that the characters in the file are recognisable no matter how your system is set up, and the small disadvantage that the file takes up a bit more space.

I could go into more detail but I have probably already overstayed my welcome...

I use VLC Player for playing videos with subtitle files

https://wiki.videolan.org/Documentation:Subtitles/

I just tried downloading the captions for a couple of different movies. After I clicked on 下载字幕, I tried to click on the downloaded thing but my computer says I can't open the file. Am I doing something wrong? I tried to see if I could view the subtitles/captions without playing the film

What is the format of the files?

If you are downloading from Shooter.cn, the files come packaged in a .RAR archive. You will need to have some software to extract the files, 7-zip ( http://www.7-zip.org/ ) is a good free option.

If they are .SRT files you will be able to open them in Notepad. You may see garbage characters however, in which case you should de my earlier post about using Notepad++ to switch the codepage.

If they are .IDX/.SUB files you won't be able to see the subtitles without installing some subtitle editing software.

If you email me I can give you some info on another way to get movie files with subtitles already included (same goes for anyone else who is interested) - might be even easier than using DVDs!

@Alan okay sure, what's your email address?

If you're on beta, you should be able to private message him in the "Message" tab after clicking on his name to get his profile popup. Then you don't need to post the email address here.

@Nick I just switched to Beta and tried what you wrote, but it didn't work. It's okay though, because it looks like Alan has an email address in his website which there's a link for

Yes sorry I should have been clearer- forgot I'd changed the email in my profile to a website link. Got your message anyway and replied.