Hardcode .srt subtitles to .mkv file without loss of quality

[bloodcell]

Hi all,

I have a 4GB 720p .mkv file, and I'm trying to hardcode subtitles onto its video stream (in order to be able to watch a movie on my Philips 8605 TV, which plays .mkv's but doesn't deal with subtitles - external or internal to the .mkv).

I've went through a ton of tools, but can't quite accomplish this simple requirement - keeping video codecs \ settings \ quality exactly as it is in the original .mkv file.

My best course of action so far was to feed my .mkv file to mkv2vob, which hardcodes the subtitles and creates an .mpg file,
and then to use HandBrake in order to re-convert the .mpg into an .mkv.

However, two conversions is one too many, and when using both programs I need to set parameters which I would like to avoid (because I don't know what they mean).

Is there a straight-forward way to hardcode subtitles onto an .mkv, while maintaining the original .mkv's characteristics \ properties ?
By the way, the .srt fie is UTF-8 of Hebrew.

Thanks for any help !

[AlanHK]

Perhaps your player will recognise subs as separate file (rather then muxed into the MKV.
If you haven't already, try an SRT (same file name with .srt sufix).
Hebrew could be a problem though.
Or try making sub/idx, or sup subtitles (i.e., bitmap subs).

[bloodcell]

Nah, dude, I tried the basics, Philips admit that the TV doesn't support subtitles of any form.
The proper solution would be to have a streamer \ PC connected to the TV, but that won't happen,
and so - I need to hardcode and my question remains.

[poisondeathray]

Not possible without loss of quality - Hardcoding means re-encoding, which always means incur some quality loss when using the same lossy compression format

You could use xvid4psp or avidemux to hardcode it directly instead of 2 conversions