.srt subtitles
Ever wondered how to hardcode .srt subtitles into a video?
Or how to modify the font size before fusing them?
These notes will show exactly how.
From ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8
For the process to be successful, we need the .srt file to be UTF-8
encoded.
Spanish subtitles files are commonly encoded as ISO-8859-1.
So, is it ISO-8859-1 or UTF-8?
We can find out with:
file some.srt
If it's UTF-8 encoded, you'll see something like:
some.srt: UTF-8 Unicode text, with CRLF line terminators
If it's ISO-8859-1 it'd be:
some.srt: ISO-8859 text, with CRLF line terminators
To change the encoding for a file from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8, use:
iconv -f ISO-8859-1 -t UTF-8 some.srt > utf8.srt
Now your UTF-8 encoded subs will be in the utf8.srt file.
.ass subtitles
The downside to using a pure .srt file, is that you cannot tweak the subtitles.
Convert .srt to .ass
That's why it's better to convert them to .ass:
ffmpeg -i utf8.srt subs.ass
Tweak the subtitles
To format the subtitles, just open the .ass file in any text editor and modify
the font size, etc. ---I always change the font size from 16 to 24.
nano subs.ass
Hardcode the subtitles
Save and exit, then hardcode the subtitles with:
ffmpeg -i video.mp4 -vf ass=subs.ass subtitled-video.mp4
That's it! 🎉
P.S. The process is very CPU intensive, but uses all your available cores.
The more you have the better!
I still want to hardcode .srt subtitles
Wait, before you use a .srt file, let me tell you that it's way better
to work with .ass files.
But, if you still want to go ahead and use .srt files, then you can do it like this:
ffmpeg -i video.mp4 -vf subtitles=utf8.srt subtitled-video.mp4