Hardsubs to Soft Subs & Other Questions

[Startropic1]

I have a couple projects I'm working on, and I have some questions concerning subs. Let's tackle the tougher one first:

1. I'm trying to make a dual audio mkv with soft subs. The only subs I have are in the form of a hardsubbed version of the video. Is there a way to extract/create a soft sub file from hardsubs? I don't need to remove the subs; I have a clean version of the video. I just need to copy them to a separate file for soft subbing.

2. With a different video I'm trying to do the opposite, it's an mkv with soft subs and I need to convert it to a hardsubbed AVI (PS3 & 360 cant read mkvs or soft subs.) I tried converting the mkv via handbrake but the subs didn't copy over. They didn't accidentally get saved as a separat srt/etc. file either. I followed the tutorial available on the site for converting to hardsubs with handbreak, what am I doing wrong?

[Baldrick]

1. You need to ocr it to text. I don't know anything that works with mkv though.
2. Did you try extract the sub from the mkv with mkvextract and add the srt in handbrake?

[txporter]

Handbrake doesn't hardsub with srt files. It will add them as softsubs. Try XVID4PSP. Or you can build your own avs files and use xvid_encraw.