Converting movies to ipod with subtitles

Author: nofrillz

This took me a while to figure out, but here's the deal.

I've been ripping all my movies with autogk, so in short I have a bunch of XviD encoded movies that I want to play, and use with subtitles. Apparently there's a way to add a soft subtitle track, but this doesn't work on my touch 3g so I went for the more CPU-intensive option - burning them on.

The first step was to sync my subtitles. I used Subtitle Workshop for this, and the process went as follows:

1) Get the first (or third or w/e) subtitle of the movie synched
2) Get the last subtitle of the movie synched
3) Check if they're still in synch in the middle somewhere
4) If so, then great, otherwise get different subtitles and go back to step 1 again

This worked fairly well, except for the fact that the subtitles I was using (polish) were using a different encoding from plain ASCII. This was fixed easily enough by opening the subtitle file in word, changing the encoding to central european (windows, not ISO), and then saving as UTF-8.

The last step was to burn these to the movie and encode to mp4. I had a good mp4 encoder, and autogk does subtitles, but this meant two lots of encoding and the whole thing was kinda shit. I ended up settling for avidemux, and the process goes as follows:

1) Load the movie
2) Change the container to mp4, video encoding to mp4(xvid) and audio to AAC (faac).
3) Add Mplayer resize and subtitle filters to the video (resize to 480 x whatever, subtitle font c:\windows\fonts\arial.ttf)
4) Add a mixer filter to the audio to convert to stereo (doesn't play otherwise)
5) Hit save and it'll work


And then you're done. Drag and drop, and enjoy your movie :D