How to add subtitles on movies

In the last days I needed to put subtitles on a movie.

I found a very nice freeware software (Subtitle Workshop that I will talk about in the next posts) and then I want to put the subtitles on the video itself, as one final product.

After a long search on the web, I finally found out how to do it! Here it goes:

Subtitle Burning (AVI)

Tutorial for Windows
Burning in subtitles means that we’ll put them directly into the video source. This has the advantage of being playable on every platform (even PSPs and iPhones), but the process takes a lot longer and you won’t be able to remove the subtitles afterwards.
Usually, subtitles are burned into AVI files. We’ll show you how to add subtitles to avi movie file in the tutorial below.

Files you’ll need:

• VirtualDub
• VobSub (not to be confused with DirectVobSub)
• Decent video codec, like Xvid

Step One: Installing Software

Let’s start out by installing the software.
VirtualDub doesn’t have an installer, so it can be unzipped right on your desktop or in another folder of your choice. No special options are required during the Xvid installation either.

During the VobSub installation, please make sure that you’ve selected both “VobSub for VirtualDub” and “TextSub for VirtualDub and AviSynth” under plugins.

You’ll also need to specify the directory where you’ve unzipped VirtualDub.

Step Two: Preparation

Start by opening the VirtualDub application – open the VirtualDub.exe file in the unzipped folder – and open your AVI file.

Next, we’re going to be enabling the TextSub filter. Navigate to Video -> Filters -> Add… and locate it in the list.
Select the TextSub filter, and press OK.

If you don't the filter "TextSub 2.23", then you should google it and download it. Afterwards you just need to load it in this menu.

In the pop-up window, press “Open” and browse to your subtitle file. This file must be in one of the supported subtitle formats (srt, sub, smi, psb, ssa, ass).
When You’re ready, press OK.

Back in the video dropdown menu, make sure you’ve got Full processing mode selected, and go to Compression.

Here you need to select one of the available codecs. Xvid does a great job for a free codec, and that’s the one I used. You can alter some settings, and tweak the quality of the video if you press Customize – however, if you don’t know what you’re doing, you’d best leave it be.
Accept everything when you’re done.

Also make sure that the program’s set up to do a Direct stream copy of the audio; this doesn’t need any processing.

Finally, save the video somewhere on your computer, and wait for the process to finish.

This can take quite a while and is quite memory extensive, so you might want to leave your computer alone for an hour or two, and do something else for the time being. If you’ve got big files to process, you can run the application at night.

I hope you found this guide helpful and you were able to learn something from it. ;)