[MEncoder-users] Mencoder Subtitles not working

[James Hastings-Trew]

I'm trying to burn subtitles into a video with mencoder. I know that 
this has worked in the past, but doesn't seem to work anymore.
This works to play back the raw video with subtitles;

mplayer video.h264 -sws 9 -vf scale=1280:720 -sub subtitles.srt -utf8 
-subfont-autoscale 0 -subfont-text-scale 35 -subpos 98

This does not work to encode the same subtitles into a file:

mencoder video.h264 -sws 9 -vf scale=1280:720 -sub subtitles.srt -utf8 
-subfont-autoscale 0 -subfont-text-scale 35 -subpos 98 -ovc lavc -o test.avi

There is no error message that something failed. The resulting video 
just has no subtitles in it. Is something broken that shouldn't be? I 
looked around the list and found a few others asking similar questions, 
with no answers given. Thought I'd give it a shot.

Here is mencoder's output:

MEncoder Sherpya-SVN-r28311-4.2.5 (C) 2000-2009 MPlayer Team
CPU: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4200+ (Family: 15, Model: 
43, Step
ping: 1)
SSE supported but disabled
SSE2 supported but disabled
CPUflags: Type: 15 MMX: 1 MMX2: 1 3DNow: 1 3DNow2: 1 SSE: 0 SSE2: 0
Compiled for x86 CPU with extensions: MMX MMX2 3DNow 3DNowEx

success: format: 0  data: 0x0 - 0xf0816a00
libavformat file format detected.
[lavf] Video stream found, -vid 0
VIDEO:  [H264]  1920x1080  0bpp  23.976 fps    0.0 kbps ( 0.0 kbyte/s)
[V] filefmt:35  fourcc:0x34363248  size:1920x1080  fps:23.976  ftime:=0.0417
Opening video filter: [expand osd=1]
Expand: -1 x -1, -1 ; -1, osd: 1, aspect: 0.000000, round: 1
Opening video filter: [scale w=1280 h=720]
SUB: Detected subtitle file format: subviewer
SUB: Read 806 subtitles.
SUB: Adjusted 1 subtitle(s).
==========================================================================
Opening video decoder: [ffmpeg] FFmpeg's libavcodec codec family
Selected video codec: [ffh264] vfm: ffmpeg (FFmpeg H.264)
==========================================================================
VDec: vo config request - 1920 x 1080 (preferred colorspace: Planar YV12)
VDec: using Planar YV12 as output csp (no 0)
Movie-Aspect is 1.78:1 - prescaling to correct movie aspect.
SwScaler: reducing / aligning filtersize 10 -> 12
SwScaler: reducing / aligning filtersize 10 -> 12
SwScaler: reducing / aligning filtersize 10 -> 9
SwScaler: reducing / aligning filtersize 10 -> 9
[swscaler @ 01E9C020]Lanczos scaler, from yuv420p to yuv420p using MMX2
[swscaler @ 01E9C020]using n-tap MMX scaler for horizontal luminance scaling
[swscaler @ 01E9C020]using n-tap MMX scaler for horizontal chrominance 
scaling
[swscaler @ 01E9C020]using n-tap MMX scaler for vertical scaling (YV12 like)
[swscaler @ 01E9C020]1920x1080 -> 1280x720
videocodec: libavcodec (1280x720 fourcc=34504d46 [FMP4])