Convert MKV and keep subtitles

JingKoB said:

Does anyone know how to convert from a MKV file and keep the subtitles? Like flatten out the video when the subtitles are fully loaded? I really would like to find a way to do this. Thank you!

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Use MKVtools to extract the subtitles from the mkv, use subcleaner to clean the srt file, make sure you save it as UTF8, then use subler to add the subtitles to the mp4.

NJuul said:

Use MKVtools to extract the subtitles from the mkv, use subcleaner to clean the srt file, make sure you save it as UTF8, then use subler to add the subtitles to the mp4.

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Thank you so much! I recently picked up Mongol on blu ray and couldnt watch it on my ATV without subs. This process worked flawlessly, however, I just left the file as an srt.

Zonyc said:

Thank you so much! I recently picked up Mongol on blu ray and couldnt watch it on my ATV without subs. This process worked flawlessly, however, I just left the file as an srt.

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You're welcome
However, UTF8 is a uhmn, character encoding format, and the .srt file has to be encoded in UTF8 in order for the subtitles to displayed by quicktime (which runs the video on the ATV). If it is not, quicktime will crash.
I think subcleaner by default encodes in UTF8, but if you download srt's from the internet, or edit them yourself, you will often find that they are not encoded in UTF8, and if you do not do so yourself, you will end up with a video that crashes the first time subs are to be displayed.
It's really easy to fix though, open the .srt in textedit, "save as", and then choose "UTF-8" as the format (if you can't, then first choose "make plain text", in the "formats" menu). Don't change anything, and just save with the same name.

NJuul said:

You're welcome
However, UTF8 is a uhmn, character encoding format, and the .srt file has to be encoded in UTF8 in order for the subtitles to displayed by quicktime (which runs the video on the ATV). If it is not, quicktime will crash.
I think subcleaner by default encodes in UTF8, but if you download srt's from the internet, or edit them yourself, you will often find that they are not encoded in UTF8, and if you do not do so yourself, you will end up with a video that crashes the first time subs are to be displayed.
It's really easy to fix though, open the .srt in textedit, "save as", and then choose "UTF-8" as the format (if you can't, then first choose "make plain text", in the "formats" menu). Don't change anything, and just save with the same name.

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Oh thats strange! I did use subcleaner as per your recommendation so it must have encoded to UTF8 since I had no problems what so ever! I can finally watch Apocalypto now too!

Hopefully anyone having issues with mkvs and subs will see this great post from NJuul!

I am the author of Subler, and I can definitely say that there aren't any problems with utf-8 or utf-16 characters.
And there is no need to convert the srt to utf-8.

Ritsuka said:

I am the author of Subler, and I can definitely say that there aren't any problems with utf-8 or utf-16 characters.
And there is no need to convert the srt to utf-8.

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I do apologize for my lack of knowledge then!
And please accept my most sincere thanks for that extraordinarily useful piece of software! I have used it to add soft subtitles to more than 20 movies so far, and I must say I am really happy a about the results! And I have not even started playing with the new features you have added recently.

But may I ask, I was under the impression that the subtitles had to be in UTF8, as a few times I had added subs to a file, and it crashed quicktime when it was to display the subs. Opening the .srt in textedit and saving the srt in UTF8 corrected this. So subs can be either UTF8 or UTF16, but nothing else then?

And again, thanks for subler! I really missed something like that to add soft subs to my movies (considering re-doing my DVDs, to get rid of hardcoded subs - but it just takes so long )

Well subler automatically convert everything to utf-8 or utf-16, so you shouldn't need to do it manually. There was a bug in a previous version that didn't count utf-8 characters size properly, but it was fixed in the last version.