h264 MKV with Soft Subbs?

[Paty Punk]

I finished a Video. It has a german song, so I would like to add soft subbs in english.

I want to save it as a h264 mkv...Can anyone tell me how to do it?

[post-it]

RE: soft sub's .. ditto; I'm working one one with four soft subs and I'd like to know how to combine everything together too

[Qyot27]

First, compose the subtitles in whichever format you prefer - SRT is probably easiest to type out on your own, and if you want to do fancier SSA/ASS subs then you can take the already-finished SRT into Aegisub and fix it up there.

Encode your video using whatever method you prefer - I use MeGUI, others around here use zarx264gui, etc. You'll probably have an H.264 MP4 file after this is done.

Encode your audio using whatever method you prefer - Nero or iTunes for AAC, oggdropXPd for Vorbis (I go for the aoTuVb builds), LAME and [insert preferred frontend here] for MP3. Generally I'd recommend AAC or Vorbis if you're going to the trouble of using H.264 and a container like MKV, although MP3 is good for compatibility issues (and moreover, MKV does properly support VBR MP3 streams). The video encoding program you use probably will have an option to encode audio for you, but it's useful to know how to do it separately just in case.

Finally, take all of these components (video, audio, and subs) and load them into MKVMergeGUI (part of the MKVToolNix project) using the Add button. Choose an output folder if you want it somewhere other than the directory the sources are in, and then hit 'Start muxing'. It'll do its thing, and you're done.

If you have a widescreen video and would like to use anamorphic encoding, then all that would be needed is to encode the video at 720x480 (or 720x576 for PAL), and then during the step with MKVMergeGUI, select the video stream from the Tracks area. Next, select the 'Format specific options' tab and choose either Aspect ratio (and set to 16:9) or Display width/height (and input the real display dimensions). Then mux as usual.

[post-it]

-- finding an ssa to SRT converter;
.. I'm still use Sub Station Alpha 4 ^_^ .. 0_0 .. o_o .. ;__; forgive me !!

.. I think I pretty-much got every thing else ^___^ .. now to launch the littles in the Pool for a while so I can give this a try ....

[Paty Punk]

Thanks for the Help Qyot27. I am still having a problem though.

First, compose the subtitles in whichever format you prefer - SRT is probably easiest to type out on your own, and if you want to do fancier SSA/ASS subs then you can take the already-finished SRT into Aegisub and fix it up there

Only Part I don't really understand. Simple Question: How exactly do I compose the subtitles?

[post-it]

.. oh wow .. that is like a dream-come-true; Subtitle Workshop v2.51 .. no more ripping the Audio and converting iit to to an 8K Mono file to get the timings correct -- this actually allows me to view it, hear it, modify it and Play it back in Real Time ^_^

.. SubTitle WorkShop 2.51 -zipped-

.. now if they only made a LAME or MP3sx audio encoder that works with VirtualDubMOD and can handle 32bit 96K sampling rates at 640k baud rate -- I'd be in heaven

[post-it]

.. I am doing this, not as an insult, but as a reference .. like a how to -- if you have never used a sub-titler program before ( its basically timed writings that you can save and modify at will. )

.. this puts Sub Station Alpha to shame! .. then you simply "save" it in the Format you need ... .ssa .srt .#@$ whatever you need.
.. in the options, you can set almost anything TEST related to the screen including Color.
.. .. .. this is from "Kodomo no Jikan 07"
if you ever wondered How things get Sub-Titled, this is it ^_^

[Qyot27]

Thanks for the Help Qyot27. I am still having a problem though.

First, compose the subtitles in whichever format you prefer - SRT is probably easiest to type out on your own, and if you want to do fancier SSA/ASS subs then you can take the already-finished SRT into Aegisub and fix it up there

Only Part I don't really understand. Simple Question: How exactly do I compose the subtitles?

I do it in Notepad, since the script requirements for SRT are simple. For example:

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01
00:12:13,950 --> 00:12:15,350
Chinsuko

In other words,

Line Number
Display Start Time (hours:minutes:seconds,decimal) --> Display End Time (same time format)
Subtitle content

Then I just make sure the script name is the same as the video I'm wanting to sub (except for the extension), and since I have DirectVobSub installed, it autoloads the subtitles while I'm watching the video. I time by eye/ear and then use VirtualDub's timecode display to tighten up the sync if I need to. Works well for the average 3-4 minute video, but for stuff like a fansub I'd die if I had to do it that way.

What speeds it up is that I simply watch the video first and have notepad open with the song lyrics already typed out, and whenever a line begins to be spoken that I need to subtitle I pause the video and write down the approximate time it comes on next to the line. I also note the time when the next line gets spoken and so on. I just estimate the end position for most lines at first, since most of the time there probably won't be overlapping lines. And then like I said, I tighten up the sync later by ear and by looking at the timecode output in VDub.



And I need to clarify something I said earlier a little bit:

Next, select the 'Format specific options' tab and choose either Aspect ratio (and set to 16:9) or Display width/height (and input the real intended display dimensions).

Intended display dimensions. The video is 720x480, but the intended display dimensions are 848x480.

[Qyot27]

Ack, double-post.

To make it easy on the viewer (and not to annoy them), if you don't want the subs to show up automatically, it's easy to make a false subtitle file, just by having a normal SRT script but with nothing in the script area. It doesn't need to be long, either. This works fine:

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01
00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:01,000

[code]

And just use that as the first subtitle track.  Unfortunately, things like Windows Media Player and Media Player Classic (or maybe it's just Haali's Media Splitter) don't seem to acknowledge a setting of not showing subtitles by default.  If you have subtitles in the video, it will display them, specifically the first sub track - hence the reason for having a blank script there.  That way, if the viewer wants to see the subs, they still have the option to.  For examples of videos that use a blank subtitle to fake out those media players, you can look at [url=http://www.animemusicvideos.org/members/members_videoinfo.php?v=152804]the video Bakadeshi recently announced[/url], or these three of [url=http://www.animemusicvideos.org/members/members_videoinfo.php?v=125207]mine[/url] that [url=http://www.animemusicvideos.org/members/members_videoinfo.php?v=141384]have[/url] subtitle [url=http://www.animemusicvideos.org/members/members_videoinfo.php?v=146948]streams[/url] (with that last one, the right file is the one on LOCAL - it's also an example of anamorphic encoding, and is 59.94fps; all three have examples of Matroska's Attachments feature to varying degrees).

[Qyot27]

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01
00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:01,000

Fixed.