Ubuntu – make MPV player to pick up any subtitles available in the folder

subtitlevideo

i'm using this really amazing video player in ubuntu, i just want to make little change in it's behaviour with subtitles (.srt files)

Default Behaviour

currently MPV shows subtitles which are hard coded in a video file or srt file which is exactly named as the video file, for eg it'll pick up the subtitle file if the name of video file is video.mkv and name of the subtitle file is video.srt , but it won't pick it up if it's different.

What I want to achieve

it should pick up any and all the subtitles which are available in the same folder as the video file, automatically

Best Answer

To provide an actual mpv only answer, you can specify the mechanism by which subtitle tracks are loaded in your mpv.conf file located at .config/mpv.conf as explained here in the mpv manual. In your case you would add sub-auto=all.

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – Video player with good subtitle rendering

I would suggest using MPlayer. It's a really nice, feature-rich player, but often beginners have problem with the interface (CLI based by design) and the "too many possibilities" (which is also the result of being feature-rich player btw). "Raw MPlayer" (without frontends) allows you to position your subtitles with keys 'r' and 't', also you can try key 'a' to modify alignment. You can also learn about options and default keybindings by typing man mplayer within terminal. You can also visit the documentation of MPlayer at MPlayer's site: http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML/en/MPlayer.html

You can also try to use many of the GUI based frontends written for MPlayer, like SMPlayer, Gnome mplayer, etc. MPlayer has its own GUI too, some people say it's not so good as some frontends though. On default install it can be launched with command 'gmplayer' or by looking the menu item showing installed softwares (make sure you haven't tried the nogui version - from the package name - because it has not got GUI support compiled in!).

About your question: mplayer can use TTF fonts, shaded/antialiased, positioned, etc as subtitles, so as far as I can imagine it should be enough for your needs, if usability is not a problem at least :)

Ubuntu – How to embed subtitles into a movie file

Short answer

You could use mkvmerge (apt-get install mkvtoolnix) to create a Matroska container and include the subtitles in the output:

mkvmerge -o output.mkv input.mp4 subtitle0.srt subtitle1.srt

This does not require re-encoding, so it is pretty fast.

Further customization

You may set the language and name of each subtitle track:

mkvmerge -o output.mkv input.mp4 \
    --language 0:en --track-name 0:English english_subtitles.srt
    --language 0:es --track-name 0:Español spanish_subtitles.srt

Note that we used for both languages the same track ID (0:), which corresponds to the input video track.

The --language needs to be properly encoded. You can list all allowed ISO 639-2 and ISO 639-1 codes with:

mkvmerge --list-languages

Other useful features

You may also set the title of the output video with:

--title "Your title"

We can check how all subtitles were added to the output:

$ mkvmerge -i output.mkv
File 'output.mkv': container: Matroska
Track ID 0: video (MPEG-4p10/AVC/H.264)
Track ID 1: audio (AAC)
Track ID 2: subtitles (SubRip/SRT)
Track ID 3: subtitles (SubRip/SRT)

If you really want to "burn" the subtitles in the video, you may use ffmpeg instead.