How to soft code an MKV with subtitles?

Question

I have an avi and corresponding .srt file for subtitles. I hate having two files for this movie, so what I want to do is convert this file to mkv as I heard it can hold subtitles. I have handbrake to convert the file, but will that allow me to include the subtitles? If not, how would I go about putting the subtitles into the mkv?

Solution

Use MKVMergeGUI.

mkvmerge and mkvmerge GUI (or just mmg) are two programs created by Moritz Bunkus. They're part of the mkvtoolnix package. mkvmerge can read a lot of different multimedia files and put their contents into Matroska files. Unfortunately this is a command line program, and not everyone is comfortable working on the command line. This is where mkvmerge GUI comes into play. It is a GUI that provides the user with an intuitive but powerful interface to mkvmerge.

Try this example (source):

mkvmerge -o out.mkv input.avi input.srt

Comments

[Admin]

you're looking for 'hard coding' the subtitle into the video file :)

[quack quixote]

no, he's looking to embed the subtitles in the MKV as a subtitle stream (similar to a DVD's subtitles). this is 'soft' because a player can choose to display the subtitle stream or not. 'hard coding' is rendering the subtitles into the video stream, ie permanently changing the video stream, where they can't be turned off by the player. AVI doesn't support subtitle streams, so hard coding is the only way to do that with AVI.

[Admin]

i stand corrected.

[liori]

And you can use it without reencoding your video, so no quality lost.

[Admin]

old answer with links dead

[nik]

chk forum.videohelp.com/threads/… in place of the first link; other links seem to be ok.