Can't merge a subtitle with video with handbrake.
 

Hi !

I'm using Handbrake 0.9.5 for encoding and I'd like to add a "hard-subtitle" to a video : the subtitle has to be a part of the video.

I've seen on makeuseof.com that we could hard-sub a video thanks to the "Forced only" option.
On Ubuntu 10.04 amd64, I don't have any checkbox for this option while importing SRT file. I've got the checkbox for "subtitles" I add by clicking on the "+ Subtitle" button, but it seems to be useless (I had a video_name.srt next to my video_name.m4v video file to re-encode).

Is Handbrake now supporting only soft subbing ? Or is this the Ubuntu interface that's bugging ?

Thanks !

Pit.

OK, I think I 've understood something : when using the "+ Subtitle" button, HandBrake will search on Source the subtitles corresponding to the language selected. In my case, the source has no subtitle so it won't have anything to merge with the video.

I tried with Avidemux, it work well, but it also adds a shadow to the subtitles... and it make it bad, so the subtitles looks very bad. Can we tell Avidemux to DO NOT add shadow to the subtitles ?

Thanks !

I'm stupid or is HandBrake doesn't support Hard-subbing anymore ?
I've done a MKV from my video and added the subtitles to the MKV. Then, I selected the newly created MKV in HandBrake, it recognize my subtitle but I don't have the checkboxes for "Burned in" and "Forced Only". WTF ?!

I just have tried on HandBrake 0.9.5 on Mac OS X and there is the same problem, so HandBrake is not supported Hard-subbing anymore. Yeay ! -_-

Does anyone knows an app that allows to merge the subtitles with the video, with options on the subtitles if possible (like font-color, font-style, background color, etc...) ?
As I said before, I already have tried AviDemux.

Thanks !

Pit

Handbrake should still support hard subbing. Forced Only means that it only shows a subtitle when necessary, like if its a scene in an English movie where some French people are talking, it would show subs only for the French.

To do a hard sub, choose the Burned In option.

Thank you Cultist for your response, I'm feeling less alone ! ^^
The "Burned In" option isn't choosable : there's no checkbox displayed... -_-'

wait, I misunderstood. You're trying to add in an external subtitle file? Or rip a dvd with subs on it?

I'm doing a screencast with subs in it, as annotations.
The best would be to select my video (the screen capture), then add a subtitle as a SRT file.
But I can add my video and my subtitle in a MKV and then select the MKV file as Source on HandBrake, if needed.

Okay, thats something that handbrake doesn't really support. It can do hardsubs only if its being ripped from a dvd along with the video stream.

What you need is the mkvmerge tool, which is part of the mkvtoolnix package. If its not in the ubuntu repository, you can get it here. The manpage for mkvmerge is on that site as well so you can see how to use it. Its pretty simple. This will allow you to take an mkv video file and merge the srt as a hard sub (or soft sub if you prefer)

Thank you !

I already have mkvmerge GUI v3.0.0 so I think I could make it with it.
Is the mkvmerge tool supports the export as an AVI file ? I'd like to make the video be readable by almost anyone, which is not the case for MKV by now.

It doesn't support file format conversions, but ffmpeg will do that for you.

That's too bad, I'll have to make 3 encoding for all...
1 for the screen video captured by RecordItNow
1 by mkvmerge in order to merge the subtitles and the video
1 by HandBrake to have a video file playable by anyone

I could save 1 encoding by using Avidemux, but there is a crapy shadow on subtitles with this tool. Maybe you know how I could tell Avidemux to do not add its shadow ?

Thank you for all anyway.

mkvmerge do not support burning subtitles on the video, as far as I see.

I'm still trying to make it work with Avidemux, but it's all buggy when I build it from source. I'll let you know if I find a solution to my problem.
That's really anoying to see that there's no good app to do this on Linux...

OK, it seems that the font used is very important.
I used Arial Bold Italic to have a quite good result. It's not as good as what we can see on this article, though.

I did a test and was in fact able to easily merge an avi file and an srt file into one mkv file. The subs are soft instead of hard, but most people prefer that anyway.