Merging / hardcoding subtitles in a video

[cdl]

As per my other post:

http://androidforums.com/android-media/440010-there-any-player-supports-idx-sub-subtitles.html

I have yet to find a player which supports idx/sub subtitles and works decently on my Samsung Galaxy S2 (but this is a generic question, unrelated to a specific phone).

So I was thinking of merging / hardcoding subtitles into some of the videos I have (luckily I have a quad-core PC which is quite fast at video encoding). I managed to do it with avi files, using virtualdub and vosub (both free).

But how can I do the same with h.264 videos in mkv or mp4 files?

Thanks!

 

[cdl]

After a few tries, I managed to answer my own question.

Handbrake lets you merge (burn-in, it calls it) subtitles saved in external srt files or embedded in an mkv as idx/sub. If the idx/sub files are not embedded you cannot add them directly, but you can first embed them with mkvmerge (the process takes a few seconds on my quad-core).

Ripbot264 lets you merge subtitles in idx/sub format regardless of whether they are embedded in the same mkv as the video or not; however, it is about 3-4 times slower than handbrake on my pc, probably because it is coded in Delphi and/or doesn't utilize all 4 cores of my PC.

Hope this is useful to others.