Any possibility of allowing "burned in" subtitles?

[soccerguy]

• MakeMKV handles Blu-Rays that AnyDVD cannot, so I shelled out the money to activate your software. Have not been disappointed: great product.
• I then use HandBrake to compress the MKVs to MP4s at roughly 750 MB/hr with little if any visible loss of quality. Handbrake is also the only compression product I've tried that NEVER has out-of-sync audio, and generally is a "set it and forget it" product once you have your settings. I even set up a shortcut for my non-techie wife to telnet in from her Mac to rip Blu-Rays and DVDs... and she does it! Anyway, Handbrake is am amazing product as well, but its support for subtitles is, well, LESS than an afterthought.
• Why MP4, not MKV? Just trust, me, not possible. CableCARD device in HTPC precludes installation of codecs (makes MKV unplayable via Windows MCE), plus ability to play on Xbox is a must for me to go through the trouble.
• The problems are MS's fault, but that's the constraints of what I'm trying to do. MS is the only way to watch digital cable on a HTPC w/o paying monthly fees for multiple set-top boxes.
• Handbrake has known about their Blu-Ray subtitle suckitude for years and have not fixed it. Hey, it's a free product, so can't complain too much.

tl;dr If subtitles are not burned in, they will not show up in Windows Media Center without codecs, and codecs are not a possibility for many users. My enhancement request? Allow burned-in subtitles. This is an important problem, because many movies contain forced subtitles. This could easily be one of those payware-only features.

Thanks for your time.

[crowfax]

tl;dr If subtitles are not burned in, they will not show up in Windows Media Center without codecs, and codecs are not a possibility for many users. My enhancement request? Allow burned-in subtitles. This is an important problem, because many movies contain forced subtitles.

Burning in the subtitles would require re-encoding, and MakeMKV is not an encoder.

[soccerguy]

tl;dr If subtitles are not burned in, they will not show up in Windows Media Center without codecs, and codecs are not a possibility for many users. My enhancement request? Allow burned-in subtitles. This is an important problem, because many movies contain forced subtitles.

Burning in the subtitles would require re-encoding, and MakeMKV is not an encoder.

Well, that's that then. Thanks.

[knobbi]

I'm probably being a pedant, but MKV is a container format, not a CODEC.

MakeMKV takes whatever format the disc is in, and re-packs it into a MKV container, so say you are ripping blue-ray - your MKV would be packed with a MP4/h264 video, or perhaps VC-1. The subtitles are also packed into the MKV - but are separate from the video.

Burned-in subtitles would necessitate re-encoding the video stream - and you really don't want the subtitles in there, since they use up a heap of video bandwidth, interfering with the compression. Keeping them as a separate smaller section of the MKV is a much better solution.

Can you not do an firmware upgrade of your other equipment or suchlike?

[knobbi]

Does this help:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/159793/w ... enter.html

Which also seems to be the solution here:

http://www.hack7mc.com/2009/01/playing- ... enter.html

From what I've just read (I'm a Linux + MythTV user myself, don't do windows), there's two problems:
- MCE doesn't play MKV simply because microsoft is teh suxxors.
- Installing other CODECs can break MCE, which is caused by using non-official CODECs to replace official ones (like hosing the MS MPEG2 decoder with an Open Source one)

It reads like you can install MKV support via 3rd party CODECs, but you have to be careful to ensure they're legit CODECs, and they don't get preference to the MS ones.

You didn't give a whole lot of detail as to what the core of the problem is, so perhaps this is a red herring.
CableCards are a cable-TV receiver card right? So they're not doing the actual playback ?

[Marc_G]

Alternate solution: make no changes to windows. Install mpc-hc as a player. Play movies
there with subtitle support.