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

[Reimar Döffinger]

On Mon, Jan 30, 2012 at 01:34:56PM -0500, Rashkae wrote:
> 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.

Well, everything's been put into AVI by someone somewhen.
It is generally not quite "correct", hardly ever supported
and would not recommend it.

> You would have to extract the subs
> from the original video into an .srt or .ass file (with mkvextract
> command, part of mkvtoolnix.)

Yes, a srt sub with the same name as the AVI file can be used
as subtitles by many players.
.ass I wouldn't recommend, few if any really support that.