smi2ass

smi2ass is a command-line tool that converts SAMI to SSA/ASS (SubStation Alpha).

Download the executable and run it with .smi file paths:

$ smi2ass my_subtitles.smi

smi2ass will convert the specified .smi files into .ass files. It will also generate multiple .ass files if the .smi file contains the subtitles of multiple languages.

$ ls my_subtitles.*
my_subtitles.eng.ass
my_subtitles.kor.ass

Supported tags

smi2ass supports <p>, <br>, <b>. <i>, <u>, <s>, <font> and <rt> (Ruby tags).

Fixing a bad SAMI file

smi2ass will not output anything if the conversion went OK. It prints the problematic SAMI fragment if it failed the conversion, so you can find the location of the problem in your .smi file, fix it and run again:

$ smi2ass my_bad_subtitles.smi
Failed to extract time code: <sync star=1234>

Credits

The conversion script was initially forked from https://github.com/hojel/service.subtitles.gomtv/tree/3a7342961e140eaf8250659b0ac6158ce5e6bc5c/resources/lib. Since then, @trustin made the following changes:

• Added Ruby tag support
• Improved the preservation of white spaces
• Packaged into a single executable
• Updated Python from 2 to 3
• Updated BeautifulSoup from 3 to 4
• Miscellaneous cleanup