If I run:

mplayer -sub ep02.srt ep02.rmvb

I see the subtitles from the .srt file in the mplayer window. But when I run, for example (and I know this is going to give me huge output, but I figure I can play with the encoding once I get it working at all):

mencoder -sub ep02.srt -ovc lavc -oac pcm -lavcopts vcodec=ffv1 -o ep02.avi ep02.rmvb

it produces a playable .avi file whose video doesn't include my subtitles. From Googling around and reading the manpage, it seems like the above should work. I've tried additional options (explicitly specifying my font.desc file, scaling the video, switching to different output formats and codecs) but nothing seems to help.

I'm on OS X Leopard. mencoder version is 1.0rc2-4.0.1 from the MacPorts repository.

Any help would be appreciated -- I'm sure I'm just missing some magic option to make it all work! Oh, and before anyone suggests it: this file is going to be played on a device that doesn't support soft subtitles or I'd just do that instead.