I'm a little bit confused. There is no tool and no way available to do this without "transcoding" (same as re-encoding) or re-encoding to "burn-in" subtitles.
So, in Adobe photoshop, i can place another image (or text) on top of the image in a new "layer", without touching the original image at all or reducing the quality. The 2 are completely independent (much like a video track and a subtitle track), but still related. I can then perform an operation that is VERY FAST and SIMPLE to "flatten" the layers into one layer. This still does not alter the pixels of the photo, other than where the additional layer data has been written on top of it. I want to be able to do that to my movies. Basically take each frame of the video file where there needs to be a subtitle, overlay the text for x number of frames, and "flatten" the image back without changing the rest of the picture. It seems like such a simple operation, now I also realize that fundamentally video and pictures are handled much differently, but video is created from a very large number of pictures, so they aren't really so different... I can't believe that there is no software out there capable of doing this simple of an operation... 1-find first subtitle time start & end, 2-find corresponding frames, 3-"flatten" subtitles onto frame, leaving the rest of the picture alone, 4-find next subtitle & repeat. Maybe that is a feature in an adobe product that has a $5,000 price tag, but if it can do the operation in like 3-5 min per movie without losing quality, I'd be up for that! lol
You can use VidCoder or Handbreak for it, use the right profile settungs and a Quality Level of 17-19.
I am familiar with the concepts transcoding/re-encoding (i think some people use the term "muxing") to all convey the same process... Basically the data is compressed (even in the blu ray mkv file, this is still compressed from what the theaters play, and even more so than totally uncompressed 4k movies). I was surprised to find out that truely uncompressed 4K films take up anywhere from 500-750GB/HOUR up to over 1TB/HOUR of footage! So even the versions that I have now are pretty compressed at ove 10x smaller, and I'm ok with that being that is what is on the media, i'd rather not drop any additional data if i dont have to. Back on topic, I ran a few tests with handbrake, and I am:
1-Not happy with the quality of the result... I used 20 & 18 with the speed setting on medium or slow for both and I can visibly see a difference watching both versions (original and compressed) side by side on my 2x 28" Samsung 4K displays, so I would DEFINITELY see a difference on my 65" 4K TV...
2-I tried running with a number of "0", with the setting on medium, and this still looked worse than the original, and the resulting file was over 118GB from an original of 25GB file. I also tried using the "Placebo" speed, and Handbrake said it would take 8 days to finish... now mind u i Have a 6 core CPU w/hyperthreading, so that's just ridiculous...
3-Was also not happy with the times, each one of those was tested on the most recent mission impossible fallout movie, which does have some forced subs, and each encode took anywhere from 1.5 - 9hrs depending on the speed i selected. WAY TOO LONG for my movie collection of over 600 films!
Understood, but pleace note, Blu-ray data holds a lot of "Hot Air".
I'm OK with the "hot air" lol, I just want to be able to direct play my movies with the forced subs that apparently Blu Ray players can handle just fine!