How to add a black rectangular behind subtitles?

[visitor13]

I need to cover permanently burned in Chinese subtitles with a set of English ones. I only have .srt version of those. I managed to open them in Virtual Dub, add a black BG, position and preview them. It looks ok but how do I just save the corrected subs? Is there a better method? And in the worst case scenario: how could I just move srt subs a little higher; is it player dependant? Btw. I'm on Mac so learning all this and using a Virtual PC is kind of new for me.

[smiller667]

Hi,

please elaborate a bit more. What's your source and target format? Plus, what do you usually use for playback? A Mac, the virtual PC, a standalone?

Steve

[visitor13]

It's a XVID encoded avi file. Usually I would play those with VLC as it handles .srt subtitles nicely. If only .idx and .sub files were available I would use MPlayer OSX. In this particular case, as I have written above, I did manage to built a black background for my set of English .srt subtitles that covers Chinese letters. I wish I could control the shape of that bg better because right now it simply takes shape of the English text with some margins. So in case two lines of a different length are present, the top part might be shorter than the Chinese text behind it. But at least I can read what I need to. Anyway, the goal would be to create a set of separate English subs (I suppose they would have to be bitmaps) with black box behind. Another scenario would be to move the English subs up and above the Chinese ones. And finally I suppose I could just permanently burned what I built into the avi file using Virtual Dub, right?