How to burn subtitles without shooting myself?

[dimailer]

Is there any way to burn subtitles without going through nine circles of hell?

I need to be able to adjust font, size, position, color, shadow, outline, etc.

I spent an entire night trying to burn .srt on .mp4, I read forums, I watched videos:

VLC 3.x
— produces horrific blocky output, no matter how high bitrate I set
— spacing between subtitle lines keeps changing

VLC 2.x
— burns three sets of subtitles, one above the other, like a poem

Handbrake
— burns subtitles in the only font and the only size (too big), can't adjust their settings

VirtualDubMod
— does not accept .mp4

Is there some other open source software?

Am I doing something wrong?

Thank you.

[sneaker]

Convert SRT to ASS e.g. using Aegisub. In ASS you can set font, size and a lot of other things. Then either import that .ass file directly into HandBrake or mux it with video into mkv using MKVToolNix (add fonts as mkv attachments) first.

[dimailer]

Thank you.

Huge improvement. Almost everything I need. Almost.

I read the format specifications and spent the past 3 hours experimenting.

1. What's the proper format for fading in and out? I tried the two ways below, as well as a number of improvisations, but it still doesn't work.
{\fad(1,1)}Subtitle text
{\fad(0:00:01.00,0:00:01.00)}Subtitle text

2. Can I control spacing between lines?

3. When I play the exported video, the playhead can't be positioned at random, only at certain points, as if between group of pictures. Any way to avoid that?

Thank you.

Convert SRT to ASS e.g. using Aegisub. In ASS you can set font, size and a lot of other things. Then either import that .ass file directly into HandBrake or mux it with video into mkv using MKVToolNix (add fonts as mkv attachments) first.

[sneaker]

1. http://docs.aegisub.org/3.2/ASS_Tags/#\fad
2. There is no global setting for that, only various "tricks" like:
https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/347263-Line-space-height-in-aegisub
or position tags for each line...
3. Sounds like a problem with your player or its settings. (Hard to tell without more info/samples.)

[dimailer]

Thank you.

Turned out, the problem was that Handbrake does not currently support fading.

This is something that I should have researched first before experimenting the crap out of it.

1. http://docs.aegisub.org/3.2/ASS_Tags/#\fad
2. There is no global setting for that, only various "tricks" like:
https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/347263-Line-space-height-in-aegisub
or position tags for each line...
3. Sounds like a problem with your player or its settings. (Hard to tell without more info/samples.)

[sneaker]

Fading works for me with HandBrake. Don't know why the manual says it's not supported or why it doesn't work for you. HandBrake's ASS rendering is based on the very extensive libass library.


If you want to test a different software and don't mind CLI you can try mpv. It also uses libass and as a bonus seems to have a unique parameter --sub-ass-line-spacing=<value> to set the spacing. (I have not actually tested this.)

[dimailer]

Thanks for mpv. However, it does not hard burn subs, which is what I am after.

Fading indeed works with Handbrake, my mistake, I must have lost track of the tons of file I export as a trial-and-error.

Fading works for me with HandBrake. Don't know why the manual says it's not supported or why it doesn't work for you. HandBrake's ASS rendering is based on the very extensive libass library.

If you want to test a different software and don't mind CLI you can try mpv. It also uses libass and as a bonus seems to have a unique parameter --sub-ass-line-spacing=<value> to set the spacing. (I have not actually tested this.)

[sneaker]

Thanks for mpv. However, it does not hard burn subs

I'm pretty sure it can hardcode subtitles. (Not that it matter when you are already happy with HandBrake.)