www.makemkv.com

I am a mac user, and I had this problem before with Avatar and never really solved it. What's the easiest way to extract the forced subtitles from the MKV and burn them in or have them come up automatically on a finished M4V?

I am NOT on a MAC however I am having the same issue, ...please help

I'm not familiar with an OSX tools but for Windows...

* Use MKVcleaver to extract the subtitles
* Then convert using suprip or some other tool into .srt format
* Use MKVmerge on the original movie.mkv plus the .srt file, deselect the old subtitles and set the srt subtitles "Forced track flag" to yes, lastly mux a new video.

If your media player supports the setting it should always display the subtitles even when subtitles are globally turned off but not all media players do this.

To burn subtitles into the video stream use an x264 encoder like Staxrip, all you have to do is click Tools->Hardcoded Subtitle and point it at the .sup or .srt file. Handbrake doesn't seem to be great in this area at burning in subs, you can try the import SRT function and tick the box for burn in and see if that can do it.

Here's my platform agnostic workflow.

1.) Rip Bluray to mkv with Makemkv (select forced only subs in the language of your choice, before you rip.)
2.) Use Mediainfo on your finished mkv file to assertain the track number of the subtitle you need to extract.
3.) Use mkvextract on the mkv to extract the PGS subtitle stream (.sup extention) ****see below for syntax****.
4.) Convert PGS subs to Vobsub subs (.sup to .idx and .sub) using Java application BDSup2Sub.
5.) Load mkv into mkvmergeGUI application untick PGS subtitle stream and add Vobsub subtitles you just created. Click start muxing button to create a new mkv file.
6.) Load this file into HandBrake. Select mp4/m4v container. HandBrake will see the vobsub track and give you the option to burn it into the video.

The reason HB will not burn in srt subs is that there is no text to bitmap conversion engine in the software, however if the subs are already bitmaps (Vobsub) it will allow you to burn them in.

BDSup2Sub is a Java app and all the other applications have variants available for all major platforms.

Both mkvmergeGUI and mkvextract are part of the mkvtoolnix package.


mkvextract is a command line tool the correct syntax is below. We assume that Mediainfo has indicated the subtitle track as track 4. There is a thread on the HandBrake forum which you may find useful. It's geared around using AnyDvd and ClownBD then BDSup2Sub muxing to mkv then feeding that into HB which then will see the vobsubs and burn them into the video stream on conversion.

http://forum.handbrake.fr/viewtopic.php ... s+subtitle