staxrip for mac substitute?

[malakov08]

I use handbrake, but is there anything out there that is more advanced like staxrip? my goal is to encode h.264 small. Handbrake gets it done, but its rather complicated and isn't really meant to chop a file down to size, and staxrip can mux the end products together.

I use mkvtoolnix for the muxing process, same as staxrip, except not automated.

[rumplestiltskin]

What is it about Handbrake that doesn't get the job done? You may select a preset (for simplicity) and then, if you wish, alter the compression (or even select a final file size) to accomplish the task. All muxing is handled by Handbrake.

[malakov08]

Yes it gets the file down and audio muxed, but the input file has a subtitle file attached which gets lost with handbrake

[Baldrick]

Maybe avidemux

edit: Or maybe it can't mux soft subs if you want that.

[rumplestiltskin]

A-ha! Subtitles.

ffmpegX will take the ripped file and embed a ".srt" subtitle file.

ViddyUp does the same but will convert it to H264 at the same time.

There are a few other Mac apps that will embed the subtitles (even ".sub" type) during the transcoding process. I'm not at my normal Mac right now but will post again with a few more choices for you later tonight.

[rumplestiltskin]

RoadMovie will also embed subtitles (in a number of formats). Find it here:

http://www.bitfield.se/roadmovie/

I haven't used it (yet) so I can't tell you how well it works.

[malakov08]

Thanks, AVIdemux is still pretty buggy on mac. Ill try some of these out, but as of now, Ive figured that if I get the external sub file, i can just use mkvmerge to merge it after I encode with handbrake, the real problem was that I was losing the texts used in the subtitle file when I muxed it after a handbrake encode. But I have figured out how to add the text styles as mime's so that It picks the whole thing up. thanks for all these great programs

[rumplestiltskin]

Played with RoadMovie. Does a bangup job with subtitles and even can simply add the subtitles without re-encoding(!); it just "flattens" the file and does it quite quickly.

The developer also has another app named "Submerge" which (if I understand correctly) just does the "merge & flatten" without any transcoding.