Subtitle in black bars

[athxu]

Hi, is there a way to burn subtitles in the black bars underneath the movies? Putting it in position 100 puts it at the bottom of the picture, but not the bottom of the screen. Thanks.

[bucho]

https://www.videohelp.com/forum/archive/t260559.html

[mrhawkinson]

Unless your file is letterboxed the black bars are being generated by your player.

I encode twice -- once with the ffmpeg encoder so I can letterbox and a second time with the mencoder encoder so I can burn in subs.

The first encoding can be at a high video data rate as long as you have disk space.

No need to encode the audio twice. Go ahead and encode your audio to your target format the first time and use 'passthrough' the second time.

[Crelle]

Hi, if you choose to encode with Quciktime or mlplayer, and set the "v" in letterbox, then the subtitle is in the "letterbox" right ?

[mrhawkinson]

I may not be using the tool correctly, but I have not been able to letterbox and hard-sub on the same pass without the subs appearing in the movie-image part of the frame instead of the black bars. This is why I encode twice but if anybody knows how to get the subs into the black bars on the first pass please let us know!

Here's a walkthrough of my two-encodings method:

I have an AVI file of a movie and subs in SRT format. The movie is widescreen (608x336 pixels) and I want to make a copy that is letterboxed and has subtitles in the black area (so I can play it on a DivX player and watch it on a non-widescreen TV).

The file name is 'Foo.avi'

I encode two copies of the file. For the first pass, I drag the file onto ffmpegx and choose these settings:

VIDEO TAB
Video Codec: XviD [.AVI] (ffmpeg)
Codec is a matter of taste, but you must use the ffmpeg engine on this pass so you can letterbox.

Set your video parameters _before_ bitrate
Video size: enter the dimensions of the movie (608x336 in this example)
set Autosize to Unconstrained
set framerate to the framerate for your playback device

Bitrate calculator:
click the Best button to get the best video bitrate for your dimensions. This assumes you have plenty of hard disk space

AUDIO TAB
Choose an appropriate codec, bitrate, etc for your playback device. My DivX player works best with CBR MP3 and 128kbps is fine for my needs.

FILTERS TAB
This is where the letterboxing is done. What you want to do is add pixels to the letterbox boxes (under Image Filters) to change the final dimensions of your re-encoded AVI.

The engine wants the height after letterboxing to be a multiple of 16 pixels so to play on a 4:3 display, choose the greatest multiple of 16 that is less than or equal to 75% of your source file's width.

In this example, our file is 608 pixels wide. A true 4:3 would be 456 pixels high but 456 is not evenly divisible by 16 so a good height for our AVI is 448 -- the difference will be insignificant when you play the file.

The values entered in the Letterbox field are in TOP, BOTTOM, LEFT, RIGHT order so to pad our file we enter 56, 56, 0, 0. This is because we need to add a total of 112 pixels of vertical height to our source 608x336 image and it looks best if we pad equally at top and bottom.

OPTIONS TAB
I always check high quality because it sounds good! The other settings are unnecessary as long as you are encoding this pass at a high video bitrate.

Now click the ENCODE button and in a few hours (or minutes if you have a fast mac) you get the file 'Foo.avi.ff.avi', which will be the source file for pass two.

PASS TWO

Drag the file 'Foo.avi.ff.avi' onto ffmpegx

VIDEO TAB
Video Codec: Xvid [AVI] (mencoder) Again the codec is up to you but this time you want to be using the mencoder engine so you have more control over the placement of subs

Again, choose Video Parameters before using the bitrate calculator. Set your Autosize to Unconstrained and your height and width to the dimensions of 'Foo.avi.ff.avi' (608x448 in our example). Keep the framerate the same as 'Foo.avi.ff.avi'

Use the Bitrate calculator to keep it down to your target size -- I generally enter 699mb for CDR because I am superstitious. Get the MB value right and tap the Rate button. If you are playing off a hard drive or DVD-RW or something else big just tap Best again.

AUDIO TAB
Since you encoded your audio on the first pass, use the Passthrough audio codec on this pass.

FILTERS TAB
This is the tricky part. Tap the Load Subs button and choose your external subs file. Then choose your preferred font (I like TrebuchetMS), an encoding appropriate to your language and a size of 1 or 2 and a position of about 80. Then tap the Preview button at lower-right which will start Mplayer at the Start from point and show you what the subs will look like. Depending on how wide the image is and how much black space there is, you may want to increase or decrease the values of font size and position. Experiment!

OPTIONS TAB
Again, I always click high quality for no good reason. If you aren't in a hurry, two-pass encoding is worth it.

Click the blue Encode button and eventually you will have a file 'Foo.avi.ff.avi.ff.avi' (unless you typed a different name on the Save As... line).

Only a real film lover would work this hard but the output is worth the work.

-mrh