How to hardcode subtitles without damaging the quality?

[thedemonknight]

Hello friends. I am totally new to video editing so please don't mind my silly mistakes and misuse of words. And for the precise reason that am new I wanted some professional help. I am using handbrake latest edition and I want to hardcode some subtitles to foreign dialogues. The video files I have are average blu-ray rip files ranging from 1GB to 3GB in memory (mp4/mkv). Where as I have got some idea as to how to hardcode from various forums, what I really wanted to know is what settings should I use so that the video quality wont decrease and I can get the video file at nearly the same memory as the source, give or take 100/200mb. Would really appreciate some help. Thank you.

[redwudz]

If you hardcode the subs, you will HAVE to re-encode the video. No way around that. That will cause quality loss. How much quality loss depends on how good the original quality is and how big you want to make the re-encode. Larger file sizes = less quality loss.

[thedemonknight]

Hmmm I see. Thank you for replying. SO if hardcoding is done then the quality has got to change. I was hoping may be there is a more spic and span way to do it, you know like the same quality file for a 300/400mb larger than the original. But now I guess there is no straight way. Guess I just have to try some adjustments in order to get it. What settings to do you recommend my friend, say for nearly the same size with the minimum quality loss ?

[redwudz]

It's about impossible to give you a clear answer. If your source is good quality, then some quality loss may not be too apparent. Different video material compresses differently. If you have very low motion video with even lighting, then you may be able to recompress it quite a bit. But fast action, lots of contrast and dark parts, not so easy to compress. You are always better off starting with the original quality, then adding hard subs, then re-encoding to the final format.

About all I can advise is to cut out a short piece of representative video and try adding subs and re-encoding and see how it looks. At least it won't take as long as encoding the complete file. You can try different compressions and should be able to judge the size and quality of a full re-encode.

Unless you absolutely have to do hard encoding of subs, selectable subs take up very little space and don't add much to file size.

And I should move this to our Subtitle Forum where you may get more answers. I'm no expert on subtitling.

[videobruger]

Just a note:

Handbrake (and Vidcoder) are great programs but somewhat picky about hardcoding subtitles as it can only hardcode VOBSUB/PGS/ASS subtitles - and only when muxed in the source video.

https://trac.handbrake.fr/wiki/Subtitles

But I take it since it is blu-ray rips you have PGS subtitles.