.sub and MKV

[leftspeaker2000]

Hey i have riped a movie to mkv and i have extracted the subtitles the from the dvd with Vobsub which gave me an ".idx and .sub" when i try to add the .sub to my kv using mkvmerg GUI it says " does not contain any tracks" so i tried with the .idx file and it worked fine. I dont get it what am i missing the idx file is 89kb and the .sub is 6.5mb ? shouldent the .sub file be the subtitles ?

[Ai Haibara]

You have a VobSub set of subtitles. In this case, the .sub file consists of the bitmap representation of the subtitles, and the .idx file is the index (tells the player what to actually do with all of those bitmaps).

[leftspeaker2000]

So can i mux them both into a Mkv and except a player to pick them up ? or what should i do with them from there ? OCR them to SRT ? i thought you could put bitmate subtitles into an MKV? Thanks for the reply

[Ai Haibara]

As far as I know, there shouldn't be a problem with muxing VobSubs into an MKV container. You said it "worked fine" when you had mkvmerge use the .idx file... did the end result not contain the subtitles? (In other words, did it not display the subtitles when you played the video and switched the subtitles on? Does it show that the subtitles are there if you use MediaInfo to look at the video's information? If you open the video with MKVExtractGUI/2, do both the .sub and .idx files show up within the MKV?)

[MilesAhead]

What player are you using?

Some will automatically load an idx/sub pair with the same basename as the video, same as they do with .srt. Some make you use a menu command Load Subtitles to load the .idx.

Whether it works better as muxed streams or external files varies by player.

[Bully9]

I have this problem too. Mkvmerge will accept the idx file but not the sub file. When i try to load it, i get the "does not contain any tracks" error message. I can carry on with producing the mkv without the sub file (which i guess is what the OP meant), but of course, i get no subtitles when i play the mkv.

The movie (.avi) will play fine in vlc using the seperate idx/sub files, which I created from an srt file using subtitle creator. I just wanted to wrap them neatly in an mkv container and wondered why i could not do it.

EDIT - never mind. Using just the idx file is sufficient. I was just a bit quick to think they weren't being displayed - vlc needed a few seconds longer to 'warm up'.

[jman98]

So can i mux them both into a Mkv and except a player to pick them up ? or what should i do with them from there ? OCR them to SRT ? i thought you could put bitmate subtitles into an MKV? Thanks for the reply

"expect" not "except".
"bitmap" not "bitmate".

My experience is to avoid IDX/SUB and go to the trouble of using OCR to create SRT files as SRT just works better on hardware players. You can mux subs into MKV containers but some hardware playback devices may not support that. However, software players on a PC should be OK with it.

[MilesAhead]

So can i mux them both into a Mkv and except a player to pick them up ? or what should i do with them from there ? OCR them to SRT ? i thought you could put bitmate subtitles into an MKV? Thanks for the reply

"expect" not "except".
"bitmap" not "bitmate".

My experience is to avoid IDX/SUB and go to the trouble of using OCR to create SRT files as SRT just works better on hardware players. You can mux subs into MKV containers but some hardware playback devices may not support that. However, software players on a PC should be OK with it.

It depends on the player. My WD set top box the .srt support is horrible. Even with the last available firmware update setting the border thickness and font size to maximum still produces a thin hard to read subtitle. With AviAddXSubs I can use what font I want and control the border thickness, font size and how the subs are placed and spaced. In fact the author has a guide with "set it once and forget it" settings for WD player. No matter the video resolution I can right click a bunch of .srt and produce idx/sub files that will display in WD much better than .srt. The main thing to be said for .srt is you should save a copy because you can easily transform them into other subtitle types.