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How do I embed .srt subtitles on a video if I have a Mac?

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  • I'm looking for a better way to create a DVD with subtitles, without losing quality from the original DVD. I've been doing this for a while, so I know all about creating subtitled video files. The problem starts when the end product is to be a Video DVD. My current work flow is this: 1. Rip DVD as high-quality x264 2. Create timed SRT file 3. Combine the two using http://www.bitfield.se/submerge/ 4. Encode the file back to DVD format and burn DVD. This problem is that steps 1 and 4 are extremely time-consuming, not to mention the loss of quality from the original file. I tried using some utility to join the original VOB's into one file, but I didn't know where to go from there. I couldn't figure out a way to turn the joined MPEG2 file back into a DVD without re-encoding. So... What would be a quicker way to achieve this? Mac or XP solutions welcome.

  • Answer:

    Have you tried tools like http://subtitlecreator.sourceforge.net/SubtitleCreatorHomepage.html? You'll probably have to extract the DVD to a HDD location first (in case the DVD is copy-protected), but then this tool should work in conjunction with http://www.videohelp.com/tools/IfoEdit.

Silky Slim at Ask.Metafilter.Com Visit the source

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So what you're doing is just adding a new subtitle (created from the SRT original) and adding it to the original DVD? Yeah, your workflow is way too complicated and you never need to re-encode the video. Basically what you need to do is rip the DVD, demux all assets (video/audio/subs) from the relevant program chain, replace the appropriate subtitle or add another, and remux/re-author the DVD. The caveat is menus: If you care about having motion or even static menus that reflect the addition of the new subtitle, you're into pain-in-the-ass territory pretty quickly for the home user. If you don't care about menus, and are happy with a "main movie only" disc, then you're basically fine.

Inspector.Gadget

Yeah, you absolutely want to avoid transcoding. In fact you want to leave the DVD's existing VOB files alone entirely, and use tools that just mess with the IFOs. SubtitleCreator looks good.

flabdablet

For my purposes, all I need is a movie with hardcoded subs that's playable in a regular DVD player. Menus etc. are of no consequence.

Silky Slim

Hardcoded subs entails video re-encoding. If you just want the subtitle to be automatically displayed during playback from a DVD player, then IfoEdit seems to take care of that.

Gyan

Thanks all, I'm looking into SubtitleCreator.

Silky Slim

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