A good program to merge subtitles (not only white, and in italics)

[patryk8820]

Hi, do you know any program that can merge subtitles into a movie, but preserves italics and various font colors? VideoPad Video Editor allows changing subtitles, but only manually, one by one. Avidemux shows </i> instead of italics, doesn't recognize colors as well. Do you have any suggestions which program I could use? I create and modify subtitles with Subtitle Edit.

[Budman1]

Your question depends on a lot of factors. If you want to maintain all functionality like color, style, font size, font type, position, etc then you need .SSA or .ASS subtitles. SRT type subtitles do not allow for these functions. Do you mean to merge into hard-coded subtitles or subtitles on a separate track that you can turned on and off?

There are several programs to merge these both ways but it also depends on what format the movie is. MKV? (MKVMerge) MP4? (MP4Muxer) AVI? (AVIDemux) for soft-subs are good. For Hard-coding, I use Virtualdub, Avanti or Format factory in conjunction with AVISynth (textsub) since most hard coding programs give you the "One size, color, type fits all" sort of outcome.

As far as subtitles themselves, I think Aegisub is the best for creating subtitles because of its multiple shortcut keys and the fact that the latest version allows 2 sets of subtitles to be overlaid such as timings in one and subs in the other so that timings from one input can be synced with the subs from another It can also EXPORT to most subtitle formats.

Subtitle edit is also very good but the problem isn't so much the creation but the player and/or converter (conversion method) that allows proper display.

[Ai Haibara]

One thing you want to keep in mind about AVIDemux, however, is that the latest version (2.6.0) actually removes the subtitle tools/filters. They'll probably implement something different, later, but for now, those who try to use a 2.6 build may well find themselves being unable to do any subtitle work. (I was never sure how complete their ASS support was, anyway.)

It sounds like the OP might have the non-standard SRT format that uses HTML tags for things like text colors and styles, though. I've never really been sure of the support for that in any editors.