MKV subtitles labeled as HDMV don't appear upon conversion to AVI.

[ASimpleLotus]

Hello all, this is my first question I have. I am using Format Factory (which a secondary question will be if this is the best converter for this process.)

I have been converting small scenes of several episodes I have from MKV to AVI, and for a while I ran into no trouble on having the subtitles appear. However, on a certain series, the subtitles all of a sudden wouldn't show up on the converted video file. Upon checking what the difference was, when I use Potplayer and go to look at the subtitle tracks, they are labeled as hdmvsub. No matter how I tweak my Format Factory settings, I can't get the subtitles to convert along with the video file.

Is there something special I have to do for hdmvsub, or is there a better video converter that can handle this type of subtitle format?

[LigH.de]

You have issues with FF. So it is clearly not "the best tool". Furthermore, you may have ignored the warning that it may install "Possibly Unwanted Programs / Spyware".

The fact that a DirectShow based player displays subtitles does not guarantee that a converter which ignores DirectShow supports them anyway. In this case, you may have to deceide whether you prefer using a DirectShow based converter (may it be an AviSynth script using DirectShowSource, a usually disregarded method except you know how to handle your installed filters) or using a different way to handle these subtitles (which may require to extract them to a separate file so they can be processed parallel to converting the video).

There is a guide about processing HDMV (PGS) subtitles, but it is rather related to Blu-rays. I have no experience with these tools, can't tell you if they will process MKVs with such subtitles too. A tool like mkvextract may be required (if you need any GUI for it, try one of the GUIs recommended while the mkvtoolnix installer finishes).

[videobruger]

A possible route:

Extract the subtitles with (g)MKVextractGUI.
Convert the .sup file to IDX/VOBSUB with BDSup2Sub++

These are supported by FF.

[Ai Haibara]

A possible route:

Extract the subtitles with (g)MKVextractGUI.

I'm not sure, as I haven't really updated my mkvtoolnix setup in some time (I keep downloading the updates, just never quite getting around to installing them ) or had to extract anything from an MKV in an even longer period of time, but I think practically everything but MKVcleaver has issues/doesn't work with the more recent versions of mkvtoolnix.

[videobruger]

gMKVExtractGUI vers 1.6.1.0 works here.

[LigH.de]

MKVcleaver is one of the recommended tools during the completion of the mkvtoolnix setup; another was MKVextractGUI-2 (the "2" is important).