Burning .idx/.sub into XviD

[randomstring]

Hey guys, I am running into nothing but conflicting information about this, hopefully someone can help me out or at least tell me it's impossible and I should stop trying. I have some XviD movies with subtitles as .idx/.sub files. I want to burn them to disc to play on my set-top DivX player. I have gathered that for whatever reason it is not possible to do this directly (like you can with .srt files), but it's something that I feel like there has got to be some way to do it, even if it's an egregious hack.

I have had success burning .srt subtitles into XviDs that I could watch on my set-top box, but I cannot find any tools for converting .subs into .srts - is there a way to do this that I'm missing? A tool that I have not tried yet? This page seems to suggest that ffmpegx is capable of doing this, but I have not had any success getting it to work. Can it be done, or am I barking up the wrong tree?

Failing that, my next step is going to be trying to convert the XviD into a DVD with selectable subtitles using mpeg2enc and then converting that back into an XviD with burned-in subtitles. Is that a feasible option, or will I just be wasting a bunch of time?

Any help or ideas on how to accomplish this would be welcome. It seems like it should be such a simple thing, but it sure has been a pain in my ass lately Thanks everyone!

[BeardFan]

I did this before. You can put the avi + idx/sub into an mkv container and then encode with hardsubs using mencoder.

Read my old post: https://forum.videohelp.com/viewtopic.php?p=1499989&highlight=#1499989

[randomstring]

Excellent! Worked like a charm. Incidentally, in your post you say...

This will produce an avi with the idx/sub subtitles burned in the movie. It works fine for movies with standard resolutions (640x480 or 720x400). If your source movie has a different size, you have to reencode it to one of these standard resolutions before merging it into the mkv.

But I had no trouble doing this with videos of non-standard size (640x272, for example). Again, thanks for your help.

[BeardFan]

I remember that I had problems with some movies where the subs were not placed correctly at the bottom or were too small.

But when I resized the movie to a more standard size before muxing it into the mkv container it worked fine.

So there were some sizes that worked for me, and some that didn't.