Subtitle Question

[Megatherion]

i am currently attempting to encode some anime with .*** softsubs into the same mkv format with embedded/hardcoded subs for my roku player which is compatible with the audio and video just not the subs
at first i managed to get it to just encode with the softsubs working but now not even those work anymore so if anyone has knowledge of how to do this i could use your help
i would like to accomplish this with as little steps as possible i have already tried extracting the .*** subs and adding them in but they still wont show up

[meRobs]

Does the Guide on Subtitles help (see Tips & Guides, link below)?

[Megatherion]

i cant say it did
im trying to go from mkv to mkv the only difference is harcoding the subs for compatibility purposes
im even willing to try another format though i would like to stick mainly to mkv since i use the cuda encoder settings the only other format that the roku is compatible with is mp4
i do have a video converter that actualy hardcodes subs but its made for phones and has a max bitrate of 999kbps and this is useless for 720p videos

[meRobs]

Pity you didn't mention why the Guide failed you.
Section 1 gives the settings on the Render tab for an inbuilt subtitle stream
Section 2 applies to a separate SRT or SUB stream.

Your suurce file and output requirements are irrelevant.
However, the video and audio settings may be causing the failure, and of cource, since we don't know these we can't help.

Burning in the sibtitles is unlikely to occur if you set Copy Video because encoding is required in order to burn in the subs.

[Megatherion]

copy video is unchecked since it throws out an error every time
audio is AAC-LC @ 160kbps
i followed what i found on the guide and no subs appear
only time i got any subs to appear was on vobsub which stopped working for some reason but those were softsubs not harcoded like i need

i do thank you for taking the time to help out a noob with this

[meRobs]

Sorry it didn't work.
The only time I test the burning-in of subtitles is for the Test Report, listed under Tips & Guides (link below).
I haven't yet tested build 5248 (see Test Report).

Certainly it works for the sorts of files I use in the test and for most of the builds tested.
Maybe you could follow the steps I use for the Report and then change step by step towards what you want?

[ysbinns]

I hardcode many subtitles into my mkv movies when there is foreign language (non-English) in the original mkv movie. I have had terrible luck with hardcoding these subtitles into my mkv movies using Mediacoder until I sat down and did a lot of experimenting and logging all my trials and results. What I found is that I needed my subtitle track to be flagged as the default track. I can change the flag status in MKVmergeGUI. I would modify the original subtitle track to eliminate all subtitles except for the ones I wanted and then merge the modifed track back into my mkv file using MKVmerge. Then I would recode the mkv file using Mediacoder to hardcode the subtitle track into the movie. The key to making this always work was to set the "default track flag" to "yes" in MKVmerge when I merged the modified subtitle into the mkv movie.

I do this hardcoding subtitles whenever it's needed and it always works as long as I follow the default track flag rule. Hope this makes some sense to you.

[meRobs]

Are you saying that the choosing of the subtitle track as described in Section 1 of the Subtitle Guide doesn't work for you?
It works in multi-track VOB files.

As stated in Section IV of that Guide, I know of no way of copying subtitle streams from one source file, say a VOB, to another, such as MKV.
Do you know how to do this?

[ysbinns]

meRobs: I'm assuming you are talking to me.

Choosing subtitle tracks did not work for me. I was constantly having inconsistent problems with hardcoding subtitles in original files. Some files worked. Some files did not work. Same settings used on all files. And I also had inconsistent results with the files I created using modified subtitles. It was extremely frustrating since I knew it sometimes workd. Hence my long and extended testing. Only when I compared a working file to a non-working file using MKVmerge did I notice the Default Track Flag difference. The working file was flagged Yes, the non-working file was flagged No. So I changed the No to Yes, remuxed the file with MKVmerge, and found that I could now get the subtitles hardcoded. From then on I have used the Yes flag and all subtitles have been hardcoded.

As for copying a subtitle stream, I have found no way to do this, but I have not experimented with this issue. I do not require this function very often. When I do need this I just use MKVextractGUI2 to extract the srt file, do my thing with Mediacoder, and then remerge the srt file with MKVmergeGUI. No big deal for me since I always use mkv files for all my processing.

[meRobs]

Thanks for the info. It's a pity MediaCoder cannot do the right thing (set the flag) and cannot copy the streams over.