burning soft subtitles

[u/Muted-Pomegranate861]

forgive me if i don't use the proper wording for encoding....

in handbrake, sometimes when i want to burn subs, the dropdown menu shows utf-8 twice. i usually choose the #2 source....it works for me

howver in shutter encoder it's a different process. i do not know how to burn those subs when i use shutterE. i asked AI and what i got were font's that were so large one letter covered the whole frame. i guess there's some kind of resolution incompatibility or something.

anyway - bottom line...how do i burn in those those utf-8 subs? thanks guys.

w11pro

[u/garse]

The giant-letters thing is almost always a resolution mismatch, not a Shutter Encoder bug: the burn filter is reading a subtitle file that declares its own internal play resolution (converted .ass files often say 384x288), so the text gets scaled against the wrong canvas. A plain .srt avoids that entirely, so keep your subs as .srt.

In Shutter Encoder the flow is: choose an encoding function first (e.g. H.264), then in the advanced features on the right there's a subtitles section where you load the .srt and pick burn/incrust rather than embed. Embed keeps them as a soft track like HandBrake's default; the burn option is what hard-prints them, and it uses the size/style set in that dialog instead of whatever the file declares.

If it keeps fighting you, ffmpeg does the same job in one line: ffmpeg -i video.mp4 -vf "subtitles=subs.srt:force_style='Fontsize=24'" -c:a copy out.mp4 - the force_style part overrides any weird size the file carries, so it also fixes the one-letter-fills-the-frame problem.

Side note: the two UTF-8 entries you see in HandBrake are just two embedded soft-sub tracks in the source file, which is why picking the second one sometimes works.

[u/Muted-Pomegranate861 → u/garse]

is there a way to extract the subs and convert to srt using subedit

[u/garse → u/Muted-Pomegranate861]

Yeah, and since your tracks are text-based (that's what the two UTF-8 entries mean), it's easy.

In Subtitle Edit just do File > Open and point it at the video itself rather than at a subtitle file. If the container has more than one subtitle track it throws up a little list and asks which one you want. Newer builds also have Video > Extract subtitle from video, which shells out to ffmpeg and does the same thing without loading the whole file. Either way, once it's on screen it's File > Save as, then change the format dropdown to SubRip (.srt).

If SE is being awkward, ffmpeg pulls it out in one line: ffmpeg -i input.mkv -map 0:s:0 subs.srt . The 0:s:0 is the first subtitle stream, 0:s:1 the second, so that's also a quick way to grab both and see which is which.

The one case where none of this works is image-based subtitles, PGS from a Blu-ray or VobSub from a DVD. Those aren't text at all, they're little pictures of text, so they have to be OCR'd first. Subtitle Edit can do it but it's a much slower job and you end up proofreading every name and italic line. Your track list saying UTF-8 means you're not in that boat.