Painting subtitles on video

[kharan5876]

If I have an encoded avi and a vobsub track ripped using mencoder are there any simple command line utilities I can use to put the subtitles onto the video permanently?

[Blue_MiSfit]

permanently putting subs onto the video (hardsubbing) means re-encoding.

It is possible however to mux the subtitles and the video into a Matroska file (mkv) with mkvmerge. mplayer, vlc etc... can all play MKVs.

[echo]

You need to reencode the video for that. So, it would be best if you used your original source and instead of extracting the subs you used the -sid or -sland switches to encode them together with the video. If you want them for playback on a stand-alone player that's what's best.

But if you only keep it for archiving and playback on your PC you could stuff it all inside a matroska file as Blue_MiSfit said.

[kharan5876]

Normally yes I just add them into a matroska file. The only reason I was considering this is because this anime dvd I have. It has a subtitle track that is just used like when you see japanese writing on an object or the background itll say what it means.

[Amnon82]

its a forced subtitle track. When you want it permanently, you have to reencode your video-part to do it. But you can also mux it to a mkv-file, don't forget to enable it ;)