IPad – Subtitles in videos don’t appear on iPad

ipaditunessubtitlevideo

I've searched around for an answer to this, but I can't seem to find it. Perhaps someone here can help?

I've created several M4V files through Handbrake from a DVD I own, and added them to iTunes. The episodes of the TV show appear OK, but the soft-coded subtitles I selected in Handbrake don't appear as an option when playing the episode on my iPad. But, if I open these same M4V files through VLC Player, the subtitles are there, and can be turned on and off.

If they're in the M4V file, why can't I enable these subtitles on my iPad? 🙁

Best Answer

As you discovered, DVDs often store subtitles in the VobSub format, which are images, not text. QuickTime and the iOS Video app only handle SRT/3GPP format text subtitles.

Using the very handy (and free) Subler, VobSubs can be converted to SRT subtitles and packaged in an MP4/M4V. It does this using OCR, but I've found the results to be quite accurate, since the source material is pretty clean.

If you need support for non-english subtitles, you need to go here and download the proper Tesseract language file, unzip it (so you have a .traineddata file), and place it in the Contents/Resources/tessdata folder in the Subler.app bundle.

Converting from VobSub to SRT with Subler

  1. Open Subler, and create a new file.
  2. Import your existing MP4/M4V (or MKV) file (File → Import → File…).
  3. The import settings should be automatically set up properly, but make sure that the subtitle track's action is set to 3GPP Text, not Passthru.
    • Other tracks should be set to Passthru, unless you have audio in a format the MP4 container doesn't support (but this should have been taken care of by Handbrake).
  4. Click Add.
  5. Optional: Click on the subtitle track and change the Forced setting to All Samples Are Forced, if you need forced subtitles (i.e. always on, for foreign languages).
  6. Optional: Add any metadata you might want. Subler has a nice auto-search option (File → Import → Search Metadata Online…).
  7. Save the file. This should be relatively quick, since it's not transcoding any of the video or audio.
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