Mp4-To-Srv3 - Convert Video Into Colored-Braille Subtitles For YouTube

What My Project Does

This project converts an MP4 video, or a single PNG image (useful for thumbnails), into YouTube's internal SRV3 subtitle format, rendering frames as colored braille characters. It optionally takes an SRT file and uses it to overlay subtitles onto the generated output.

For each braille character, the converter selects up to 8 subpixels to approximate brightness and assigns an average 12-bit color. This is not color-optimal but is very fast. For better color control you can stack up to 8 layers per frame; colors are grouped by brightness and file size grows accordingly.

Resolutions up to 84 rows are supported (portrait mode required above 63 rows). Higher resolutions reduce FPS quadratically, so the tool applies motion blur to maintain motion perception when frames are skipped.

Demo video cycling weekly through multiple examples (Never Gonna Give You Up, Bad Apple, Plants vs. Zombies, Minecraft and Geometry Dash): https://youtu.be/XtfY7RMEPIg (files: https://github.com/nineteendo/yt-editor-public)

Source code: https://github.com/nineteendo/Mp4-To-Srv3 (Fork of https://github.com/Nachtwind1/Mp4-To-Srt)

Target Audience

• Anyone experimenting with ASCII/Unicode rendering or nonstandard video encodings
• Hobbyists interested in creative visualizations or color quantization experiments
• Not intended for production encoding, mainly an experimental and creative tool

Comparison

Compared to the original Mp4-To-Srt:

• Outputs full SRV3 with colored braille rendering
• Supports layered color control, motion blur, file size targeting and higher resolutions
• Uses SRT files to overlay subtitles directly onto the rendered frames
• Optimized for speed over perfect color accuracy

Example Command

mp4_to_srv3 input/video.mp4 \
    --subfile input/captions.srt \
    --dir output \
    --rows 12 \
    --layers 1 \
    --targetsize 12

Example Images (84 Rows, 1 layer)

Never Gonna Give You Up, Bad Apple, Plants vs. Zombies, Minecraft and Geometry Dash