How do I get subtitles to burn to a DVD?

June 27, 2006 9:07 AM

I have a bunch of Korean movies with .srt files as captions, and now I'd like to burn them to DVD. Please help!

I feel like a dumbass for asking because it seems like it should be simple, but I've been googling like crazy and the only guides I find are way complicated and only mention these files in passing.

I tried to just sort of throw the .srt file in with the movie file, but I get a message telling me that it's unable to insert the file.

I'm using Nero 7 Ultra Edition, I have Windows XP, and the files are... video clips? Is that the right term?

Is there some sort of software I should download? Any help or links would be greatly, totally appreciated.

posted by Dance Commander to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

it depends on what you are trying to watch them on. Videohelp.com is the best website I have found to get this sort of information, but there's not a lot of "one-click" solutions out there for things like subtitles.

The process I use to "burn" subtitles to a disc (which I can then watch on my DVP-642, which plays DivX files), requires a couple steps (adding a SRT filter, recalc'ng the compression, re-rendering the file) with VirtualDubMod, and two or three "plugins" that must be downloaded separately. If you need to convert these files *again* in order to get them in the proper format to burn a VCD or thaDVD then the process is even more complex -- in fact, you might need to make them one continuous file in order to be able to include all the "clips" on a single disc. Not to dissuade you, but I've found re-encoding clips in order to play on a regular DVD player a long and complex process -- it's often not worth it, unless you have a lot of free time. If you have the $60 to buy a Philips DVP-642, it'll play many of these files without any modification (the newer firmware actually has SRT support). You can purchase it at target.

I am not aware of any utilities out there that will do all of these steps for you, but most of the tutorials at Videohelp do go through everything you need to do step by step. It'll cost you some time, definitely.

If you're just going to watch the movies on your computer, you can just burn the SRT along with the data files and then use something like VLC to watch them.
posted by fishfucker at 10:47 AM on June 27, 2006

The DVD standard doesn't cater for text-file subtitles at all - subtitles are actually a sequence of bitmap images with certain restrictions. So, if you're making a proper DVD-Video disc (as opposed to a DVD-ROM with video files on it), you'll need to convert them somehow.

I don't know Nero, but according to the website the Nero Recode 2 part of "Nero 7 Premium" handles/converts .srt files? No mention of an "Ultra" edition there, but that's Nero for you...

Myself, I convert the .divx/.avi/.whatever files to MPEG-2 .m2v video & .m2a (MPEG audio, because I'm in PAL-land) using TMPGEnc (you could use Nero for this), load them up in DVDLab Pro, and import the .srt file - it handles the conversion itself.

One advantage of this is you can build much better menus than anything you'll get using Nero ;-)

(The demo versions on the Mediachance website are true fully functional 30 day expiry versions. The basic version doesn't handle subtitles; the Studio & Pro versions do.)
posted by Pinback at 6:24 PM on June 27, 2006