[MPlayer-users] Hard (or soft) encoding VOB subtitles into movie

[Brandon]

Mplayer/Mencoder 1.0rc1-4.1.2 on Debian Etch.

First off, thanks to the community for making and maintaining the best 
media player.

I used mencoder to rip an AVI and associated subtitles from a DVD for 
archival purposes.  I would like to embed the subtitles within the video 
so that I don't have to keep track of separate files.  I know that OGM 
format permits video and subtitles to be bundled, but that requires the 
subtitles to be in text form, and VOB is graphical.  I also know that AVI 
has a rudimentary subtitle-bundling technique but I hear it's not very 
good. I don't know if it can handle VOB-style subtitles.

I can now play the video and view the subtitles in Mplayer.  Is there a 
way to use mencoder to reprocess the video as it plays to include the 
subtitle rendering ('hard' subtitles)?

Alternately, does anyone know of a 'soft' subtitle container that uses vob 
instead of text?

I also investigated converting the subtitles to text form, although 
established methods (like tcextract -> subtitle2pgm -> pgm2txt via gocr) 
don't seem capable of preserving (or even deciphering) italics in 
subtitles.

I'm using the FFMPEG mpeg4 video codec.

Thanks in advance,
Brandon