Handbrake: Feature request: Make subtitle conversion configurable

[PhilJFry]

It seems like all SRT plain text subtitles in a source file are transformed to SSA, which is not widely supported by home electronics players. While I acknowledge the advantages of SSA over SRT, I would prefer having the choice.

I suggest adding a configuration option in the preferences, whether or not to transform subtitles to SSA.

[bradleysepos]

At the moment, all soft subs are transformed to SSA internally. This will likely not change; however, converting back to SRT or other formats is possible in the future. Patches welcome.

[petr-ujezdsky]

I have been reencoding majority of my video collection to High@L4 because my TV does not support any better (eg. High@L5). Then I have been fiddling with missing subtitles for hours just to find out that they have been converted from SRT to SSA that the TV also does not support :(

I would not call this "SRT Passthru" as you state in
https://handbrake.fr/docs/en/latest/advanced/subtitles.html
because you are actually transforming them into another (less supported) format. Even though you say that in the description.

Is there any chance this would move up in your ladder of TODOs? :) I would assume the passthru would be easier to implement since you do nothing with the file...

Thanks in advance.

[bradleysepos]

Sorry for any confusion. The (draft, from the old wiki) documentation article does state that SRT is converted to SSA, but we don’t make that very clear elsewhere.

Anyway, SRT is fun to deal with because pretty much no SRT adheres to the basic standard that exists. So even your TV saying it supports SRT isn’t enough for us to know what specific formatting and character encoding it would require. It’s a bit of a mess, like playing Whack-A-Mole.

Anyway, still leaving this open as a possible future enhancement. Patches welcome.

[sneaker2]

So even your TV saying it supports SRT isn’t enough for us to know what specific formatting and character encoding it would require.

Text character encoding in Matroska is always UTF-8. All other encodings are forbidden by the spec.

[petr-ujezdsky]

SRT is fun to deal with because pretty much no SRT adheres to the basic standard that exists

Another reason to make the SRT-passthrough. You won't deal with it at all then :)

[sakis14]

This is a joke!
The developers are either lying or they are not telling us something.
OP, I am using VidCoder, what you ask for was already a feature on older versions of the program but they removed it afterwards.

[sr55]

Yes, this was a deliberate change as we have already stated ...

If you want to see the old behaviour, either use an old version of the software or contribute or wait until someone contributes a patch to make it configurable.

If you want to continue with this bad attitude, feel free to leave.

[sakis14]

I am sorry if you feel offended by this but I downloaded the newest version of VidCoder and I lost 2 hours of my life trying to figure out what was going on. It was frustration, nothing more. I rolled back to the previous version I was using and everything went back to normal. SRT support was there.

And correct me if I am wrong, I looked up at least 15 change logs and I never saw anything about this deliberate change. No mention of this on this thread too. You just told so.

[jstebbins]

I lost 2 hours of my life

🎻 Collectively, the HandBrake developers have "lost" tens of thousands of hours of their life in order to make this software available to you. So sorry if I have no sympathy. It's a good thing we do this more for ourselves than for others. Sometimes I think we should just keep our software private and spare ourselves the abuse users like you throw our way.

If you don't like something, be civil and say so. If a developer has time and interest, they may do something about it. Often, none of us has the time. HandBrake is a hobby and we all have regular jobs and lives outside of HandBrake that take higher priority.

Being rude is a sure way to be sure that nobody will be interested in your problem.

[gpuberos]

I hope that one day developers will integrate this option into the software. Because Smart TV currently has a real problem with ASS support.