.mp4encodingsubtitle
I am using Handbrake to convert various movies to MP4 format, so they can be played by iPhone/Ipad… but by default Handbrake does not include the subtitles inside the output files.
I am looking for a batch solution that would allow me to do this (so I can do 20-30 files at once, not only one by one).
You could check out subler, it's a great .mp4 swiss army knife, and supports soft subtitles. I've used it with success with my Apple TV 2, and it work without issue, although I haven't tried on my iPad yet.
Don't forget the built-in Automator actions for encoding. The video plugin is very nice and has pre-sets starting with 480p (VGA size) and up.
The Encode for: Greater compatibility toggle keeps the audio and video at a lower bit rate. Depending on what your tolerance for "less degradation" is, you might experiment with Higher quality if you see too many H.264 artifacts on the default setting. It's unlikely as the encoder has a lot of room with 1.5 Mbps as the ceiling for the video data rate.
You could set up a few services to test the various settings and then make a folder action to apply your favorite encode setting to anything you drop in that folder.
Automation is fun—you might even be able to set up a folder action to do your uploading as part of this process.
Best Answer
You might use
mkvextractto extract subtitles:brew install mkvtoolnix;for f in *.mkv;do set $(mkvmerge -i "$f"|awk -F'[ :/)]' '/^Track ID [0-9]+: subtitles/{print $3,tolower($7);exit}');[[ $1 ]]&&mkvextract tracks "$f" "$1:${f%mkv}$2";doneThen use the external subtitles with the mp4 files.
The mp4 container doesn't support srt or ass subtitles, but it does support ttxt (MPEG-4 Part 17) and VobSub (sub and idx files). I couldn't get
ffmpeg -i input.mkv -c copy -scodec mov_text output.mp4to work though, or at least the subtitles weren't displayed by VLC or QuickTime Player.