[MPlayer-users] Converting closed captioning to subtitles

[eyagerlist at chartermi.net]

Has anyone written any kind of utility that will convert closed captioning 
data into to a subtitle format that mplayer can use?

I've attempted to write a perl script that parses and times the output of 
the program "ntsc-cc" included with xawtv to generate a subtitle file, but 
the only subtitle format documented in mplayer isn't the easiest to 
program for and it is easy to cause subtitles to drift out of sync.

Ideally I would like a way to get mplayer to accept subtiles in the 
following format...

starting_timestamp ending_timestamp
text

So the following lines

60	63
Hello

70	72
Goodbye

Would produce the subtitle "Hello" at the 00:01:00 mark during playback 
for 3 seconds and "Goodbye" for 2 seconds at the 00:01:10 mark.

Is there any existing subtitle format similar to this?  The most important 
feature is to be able to time the subtitles relative to the beginning of 
the file instead of relative to each other.

---
Eric