Soft Coding MKV with Subtitles – How to Guide

conversionhandbrakematroskasubtitlesvideo

I have an avi and corresponding .srt file for subtitles. I hate having two files for this movie, so what I want to do is convert this file to mkv as I heard it can hold subtitles. I have handbrake to convert the file, but will that allow me to include the subtitles? If not, how would I go about putting the subtitles into the mkv?

Best Answer

Use MKVMergeGUI.

mkvmerge and mkvmerge GUI (or just mmg) are two programs created by Moritz Bunkus. They're part of the mkvtoolnix package. mkvmerge can read a lot of different multimedia files and put their contents into Matroska files. Unfortunately this is a command line program, and not everyone is comfortable working on the command line. This is where mkvmerge GUI comes into play. It is a GUI that provides the user with an intuitive but powerful interface to mkvmerge.

Try this example (source):

mkvmerge -o out.mkv input.avi input.srt

Related Solutions

How to change a video container without re-encoding or compressing the file

MKVtoolnix can help with this. I believe someone else already suggested this package to you in an answer to another question. As a commenter on that answer mentions, it will repackage your AVI with no quality lost.

Basically, you just run the mkvmerge program. Since AVI and SRT files are both supported, you should be able to run this and get a working MKV.

$ mkvmerge -o out.mkv input.avi input.srt

If you run into problems, you'll need to figure out the proper tweaks to the command -- it can do a lot of things, but it can't guess what you want from it. The documentation is a great place to start.

FFMPEG mkv to mp4 conversion loses subtitles

MP4 does not support SRT. You can either use softsubs or hardsubs.

softsubs

Subtitles that consist as a separate stream in the file. They can be toggled on/off by the player, and do not require the video stream to be re-encoded.

ffmpeg -i input.mkv -c copy -c:s mov_text output.mp4

Player support for timed text softsubs in MP4 can be rather poor. You'll just have to try it.

hardsubs

Hardsubs are "burned" into the video so the video must be re-encoded.

ffmpeg -i input.mkv -vf subtitles=input.mkv output.mp4

See the susbtitles filter documentation for more info such as how to select a particular subtitle stream if there is more than one.