Possible to rip and include "burned in" sub-titles?

[Dougmeister]

Is there any way to include *only* burned-in subtitles when ripping a video?

I.e., the subtitles that would show up even in the movie theatre, or at home regardless of your CC settings? Where the character is speaking in a foreign language and they display the translation automatically.

[Woodstock]

Not with MakeMKV; it doesn't re-encode the video, which is necessary to "burn in" anything.

I rip with MakeMKV, then process through handbrake to do that.

[preserve]

Burned-in subtitles are, by definition, burned into the video.

Since MakeMKV copies the video stream without touching it, if the disc has burned in the subtitles, they will be burned in already.

The other option is that instead of burning them in, the studio might have included them as separate or as "forced" subtitles. In that case, you need to rip that subtitle track, and if for some reason you prefer that to be burned in, you need to do it during a re-encode via Handbrake for example as mentioned.

I've seen both methods used.

If you're unsure what the disc has, there is no harm to ripping subtitles as they are generally small and can be toggled during playback.

[Dougmeister]

Thank you for the replies.

The problem I'm facing with Handbrake is that, no matter what presets or manual settings I choose, it still compresses a 5.5GB MKV DVD rip down to half that size, or even smaller.

The video editor that I prefer (VideoRedo, for it's simplicity) "stutters" when I move to the beginning of a cut and press "play". It does not stutter at all when I edit the original MKV rip. Thus, I assume that either VideoRedo is choking on the compression or my system isn't fast enough (and it should be).

[Woodstock]

If you're outputting to MP4, make sure you have "web optimize" enabled. It will re-arrange the file to put the directory (used for faster FF and RW) at the beginning of the file.

"Half size" is because h.264 compression is MUCH better than MPEG2 (DVD video).