How to make a dub pack

Making a pack is four jobs: choose a scene, write the lines, time them against the picture, and put the video in a format the game can decode. The third one is where the work is.

Start with what you are allowed to use

This is first because it is the thing that gets a published pack pulled, and because it is much easier to decide before you have spent three hours timing something. A pack you make and keep on your own machine is between you and your friends. A pack you publish is a redistribution of whatever footage is inside it, to everybody who downloads it.

In practice that pushes published packs towards four sources: footage you shot yourself, work that is openly licensed, material that has fallen into the public domain, and anything you have explicit permission for. It is a narrower field than the internet at large and a much wider one than it first sounds — the public domain alone is a century of film, and a great deal of it is exactly the kind of overacted melodrama this game was made for.

Nothing on this page is legal advice, and the rules differ by country. What is not in doubt is the practical part: a pack built from a current film is a pack that gets taken down, and the hours you spent timing it go with it.

Choosing a scene that plays well

Most of whether a pack is fun was decided before a single line was written.

• Sixty to ninety seconds

  Long enough to build something, short enough that a room will happily watch four people each do it. Every pack author's first instinct is to go longer and every experienced one has learned not to.

• Two people, disagreeing

  An argument hands every performer a shape to work with. A monologue asks them to invent one from nothing, which is a much harder job and a much worse first pack.

• Faces you can see

  The performer is watching mouths and expressions to know where to land. A scene shot from behind, in the dark, or in constant motion gives them nothing to time against.

• Silences left in

  Resist the urge to cut a scene tight. The pauses are where the funniest performances happen, and a pack edited down to wall-to-wall dialogue has removed the room's best material.

Writing and timing the lines

Write what the character says, not what you would say. A pack's lines are a script somebody else performs, and the ones that work leave room for interpretation instead of containing the joke themselves — a line that is already funny on the page gets read flatly, because the performer has nothing left to add.

Then time them. Each line needs a start and an end measured against the video, and the standard you are aiming for is that a performer reading at a natural pace finishes roughly when the mouth does. Slightly generous is better than slightly tight: somebody who runs out of time cuts a word and sounds rushed, while somebody with a moment spare simply holds it.

Do this against the waveform rather than by counting. Speech has a visible shape, and lining a line's start up with the moment the audio moves is both faster and more accurate than any amount of scrubbing back and forth.

What to do it with

You can build a pack by hand — a video editor for the cut, a text editor for the lines, and patience for the timings. Plenty of good packs were made exactly that way, and it is worth doing once to understand what the format is.

There are also purpose-built editors that load a pack, show you its lines against the waveform, and write it back out. PartyDub's browser editor is one: it opens Choicer Voicer and Voxalike packs, marks who speaks when, and exports back to either format — which also solves the Ogg Theora conversion as part of exporting rather than as a separate chore. It is free to open a pack and edit it, and it is made by the same person who runs this site, which is worth knowing before you click.

Open the browser pack editor

Getting the video right

The game decodes Ogg Theora. Whatever you cut the scene in, the file that goes into the pack has to come out the other side as Theora video in an Ogg container, or the pack will install cleanly and play nothing.

Keep the resolution sensible while you are at it. Theora is an old codec and it is not efficient; a 1080p scene encoded to it produces a file several times larger than the MP4 you started with, for a scene that is going to be watched on a sofa. 720p is generous for this game and keeps a pack small enough that people will actually download it.

Publishing it

Test it first, on a machine that is not the one you made it on, with somebody who has not read the lines. Two things break in that test and nowhere else: a pack that is nested one folder too deep, and timings that felt right to the person who wrote them and are half a second late to everybody else.

Then put it where people look. GameBanana is where the game's packs are published and where a new one gets found; the community's own channels are where it gets played first. Write down what the scene is, how long it runs, and how many performers it wants — those three facts are what somebody is scanning for, and a pack that omits them gets passed over for one that does not.