I wanted to bake chinese subtitles into a video.
I tried mencoder, but couldn’t get it working, despite a bunch of googling.
I discovered that avidemux is available for ubuntu, and works quite well. It’s in the ubuntu repositories.
It has a gui, and it’s really easy to use.
It can handle cropping, subtitles, and other format changes, in a really user-friendly fashion.
To add subtitles, one first needs to change the video output format from ‘copy’ to … something else.
Then, one can click on ‘filters’ and add subtitles.
Gotchas for me:
- if one is using an .srt file, one might need to remove the first subtitle, the ’0′ subtitle, if it exists, otherwise a message like ‘subtitle format unknown’ appears
- I needed to change the font to /usr/share/fonts/truetype/arphic/uming.ttc , otherwise the chinese characters showed up as white squares
That’s about it. I wish I’d known about it before. It’s so much easier to use than fiddling around with ffmpeg or mencoder command-lines.