How to 'burn' a subtitle track onto an mp4 video file

Question

I would like to make a subtitle file to be a part of an mp4 video file, so that I don't have to deal with two separate files.

I imagine two ways:

• Make the subtitle an intrinsic part of the video. This will require video re-encoding.
• Make the subtitle a separate stream, but still embedded in the same video file. This is far more preferable, especially because I can disable it (unlike the other approach), or even play with the font type/size.

How do I do things the 2nd way? It would also be kool to know how the 1st approach works.

Answer 1

The Matroska (mkv) container format supports text-based subtitles embedded as a separate stream into the file.

You could use mkvmerge to remux the file to .mkv and include the subtitles in the output, which you can enable/disable when playing the video. Note that this method will NOT re-encode the video or audio, it's just putting the same data into a different container format, so it will not decrease the quality of the video.

mkvmerge -o output.mkv video.mp4 subtitles.srt

Answer 2

In a package called gpac, there is a CLI utility called MP4Box

Here is an example of what worked for me..

MP4Box  -add ~/file.noaudio.mp4 \
        -add ~/file.mp3 \
        -add ~/file.srt \
             ~/file.MP4Box.mp4   

I used a video-only and audio-only, but it will surely(?) work with a normal audio+video "movie" .... It's very late so I'll just leave it at that...

Note: The subtitles works in Totem, but not in SMPlayer...

Answer 3

Try something like:

mencoder -oac copy -ovc copy -sub subs.srt video.mp4 -o new_video.mp4