The VideoLAN Forums

I've read many of the threads here on this topic. It appears that there are many, and complex, methods that differ from file type to file type.. and with various degrees of success. What really gets dicey is when the subtitle file contains multiple language options. Many of the tutorials fail to mention how to determine which language to select.

Is there really no silver bullet available to open a video file, select the appropriate language track from the subtitle file, and then "save to" to a new file?

Many (most.. all?) new television sets and blu ray players have USB ports but are incapable of accessing the subtitle files on flash devices. The movie file must contain it 'burned' in or otherwise somehow embedded. With the popularity of these devices, there are many hundreds of people on the net trying to find remedy for this shortcoming.

Transcode and use soverlay.
VLC ain't the best to do that I am afraid.

I just found the following on the web,

Embedding subtitles into avi files on the linux command line

13 Jan 2008, 02:28
After a few hours of googling, and turning up pretty much nothing; I figured I ought to make a note of this somewhere. I often find myself in the situation where I've just downloaded some asian movie (I'm a huge fan of Asian Extreme -think along the lines of Old Boy, Ishii the killer, etc-, and, I really want to be able to watch what I've downloaded on my TV) and it doesn't have the subtitles embedded in the avi file (and no, before you suggest it, I will NOT watch dubbed crap). Microsoft, unfortunately, doesn't think anyone in the world would want to watch something with subtitles, so this isn't a feature of the Xbox360. My Xbox is hooked up to a NAS box which has all my music/tv/movies on it, and this box runs a /very/ minimal install of ubuntu - ~150mb in total.

So, down to business. You'll need transcode installed, along with mplayer, then it's a simple case of:

transcode -i videofile.avi -x mplayer="-sub subfile.xxx" -o outputfile.avi -y xvid

There are other output formats, but I use xvid, since it's supported by the Xbox. It takes a while longer than just straight transcoding, but it's worth it to not have to watch it on my laptop.

Could you help me with that command line? Do I open the "terminal" in my distro and plug in the file names for the videofile/subtitlefile/outputfile? The output file is just a random name I give to a new file, correct? I tried the above and recieved a "syntax error around '('" I don't even know if I'm on the right track. The above seems pretty simple, but again it does not seem to provide for any means of distinguishing which of the multiple languages available in the subtitle file to use.

I'm pretty new to this. I just migrated to linux two weeks ago. Much of this stuff might not be dependant on that, but even in windows I wasn't much good behind the scenes.
Transcode is a process not a utility, right? Is soverlay as well? Do you mean that VLC can accomplish this but that there are better ways?



Would you be able to describe the process for the above? I really enjoy using the USB stick to shuttle movies around, so I anticipate doing this often if I can find a relatively painless method.

# Intel Core 2 Duo T7500 Processor (Santa Rosa, 2.2GHz, 4MB L2 Cache, 800MHz FSB)
# Linux Mint 10 dvd install
# 15.4” WSXGA
# 256MB NVIDIA Quadro FX 570M Workstation GPU
# 2GB DDR2 667MHz RAM (1 x 2GB Configuration)

Fu@K it anyway. For some reason I was under the impression that burning a DVD would take hours longer than burning to USB Flash. I was wrong. It' a little faster actually with my new laptop.

So I burned the movie and subtitle files to dvd and my Blu Ray player picked them up without a hiccup.

Ok so I have this episode of an Asian Drama I download and the subs come separately as an ASS file, so far I know have to open my movie and integrated the subs, but now im trying to save the episode with the subs together but I dont know how!!! Can this be done.... Please help.
Thanks Nana