[MPlayer-users] How to generate soft subtitles with mencoder ?

[Rashkae]

On 01/30/2012 05:54 AM, a a wrote:
>
> I have some mkv files with subtitles; and things work perfectly in these files (v can enable or disable) as expected while the movie is playing.
>
> I want to transencode these files to either mkv or avi to reduce size for portable device. If I use -nosub then there are no subtitles.
>
Mencoder is really the wrong tool for handling softsubs.  What you want 
to do is extract the subs from the original mkv file and mux them into 
the new video file.  The tools to do this are part of mkvtoonix (which 
includes a nice GUI front end.)

You're out of luck if you need to make avi files.  AVI does not support 
including text subs.  You would have to extract the subs from the 
original video into an .srt or .ass file (with mkvextract command, part 
of mkvtoolnix.)

PS, you might want to try installing Handbrake on your system for the 
re-encoding of files.  Although, unfortunately, it does not yet handle 
all those 10-bit encodes floating around. However, lots of videos now 
will be in variable frame rate, and you're encoder needs to support that 
in it's output to preserve proper framerate.