Hi All, I had a few questions regarding subtitles. For a number of years, I just used basically a file browser on a raspberry pi as a media center for my tv. About 6 months ago, I was looking into LibreElec, so I installed that on the pi, figured out the file structure for movies and shows and how the scraper works, so its pretty cool actually. More recently, I was messing around with plugins for downloading subtitles. Generally, the subtitles work pretty well, but sometimes they are off, so I was just thinking of including subtitles when I rip/encode any movies and shows going forward. For DVD's, I've generally use an older version on Handbrake for like a 1 step process. For Blu Rays, I use MakeMKV, then run through an up to date version of Handbrake.

Years ago, I tried to include subtitles in all my videos, but it seemed like I could only get the 'burn in' subtitles to work, not something that I could turn them on and off. I revisited the idea of subtitles, and honestly just assumed that like you extract a .srt file with everything in it. I have used SubtitleEdit in the past, but to extract subtitles from a video and put it into a .txt file to make sort of a transcript that I needed. After opening a .mkv file in SubtitleEdit, it seemed much more complicated to generate a .srt. After some more searching, I did see that subtitles are actually images, and to generate a .srt you need to run OCR, and at least for me, was riddled with errors. After more searching, it seems that making accurate .srt files is a pretty manual process involving lots of correction. I did wonder how something like opensubtitles.org could just host all those files, it made more sense that they are generated by different people, and its not just data thats been ripped.

What I'm looking for really, is to just include the subtitles going forward with movies and shows instead of downloading then separately from a web browser or within LibreElec. Would this involve just changing my default format in Handbrake from mp4/m4v to mkv, and including those tracks? I feel like I had trouble in the past with only having subtitles being able to be burned in, but that may have been directly from a DVD, I feel like I'm getting some more hopeful results if I first use makeMKV, then Handbrake.

Any insight into how to just better the process is welcome, and if theres any good information you can point me to, so I can understand how subtitles work is appreciated, thank you!