How to burn DVB subtitles into a video file for PS3?

Question

I have recorded some TV programs using MythTV that contain DVB(-C) subtitles. I would like to play them on my PS3 with subtitles enabled. The playback on my PS3 works just fine, except that I can't enable the subtitles.

I'm able to view the programs with subtitles using MythTV frontend and VLC player.

How do I embed/burn the subtitles into a video file? I have successfully burned subtitles from a .SRT file before but I have no idea how to do it with DVB subtitles. I tried avidemux on three machines (Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Windows 7) but it just crashed with an obscure Segfault error message and stack trace when I tried to add a subtitle filter.

I have also tried streaming the video using PS3 Media Server (linux mint + win7) and it detects the subtitles in the transcode menu but won't show them when played.

Answer 1

I would probably use FFmpeg for this.

If you want to mux the subtitles as a separate stream in a container format, you'd have to use MKV:

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -i input.sub -c copy output.mkv

This will not work on the PS3, which doesn't support MP4 (and MP4 doesn't support DVB subtitles).

If you want to burn the subtitles into the video (so they can't be turned off), you can use ffmpeg's subtitles video filter (will require a very recent build of ffmpeg):

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -filter:v subtitles=input.sub -c:a copy -c:v libx264 -crf 22 -preset veryfast output.mp4