Re: Burn caption into video

On 26/02/2025 8:52 pm, Oliver wrote:

On Tue, 15 Oct 2024 07:12:23 -0600, Oliver <ollie@invalid.net> wrote

What's the best way on Windows to offline embed the text in an SRT
companion file to an MP4 video before uploading a short video clip to a web
site?

 I want to update this thread given that I've burned in probably a score of video captions since I originally opened this thread, so I want to help get the message out what worked best to do that task with Windows 10 freeware.
 Editing the srt file works only up to a point because you have to look at the video and edit the file at the same time, where the biggest problem, really, is the annoying propensity of Windows to focus on the wrong window.
 So you're always switching your mouse focus between your text editor and your video player as you navigate the video with MPC-BE or VLC freeware.
 It's a bit worse than that with an editor because when you add a caption in between two existing captions, you have to renumber all subsequent indices.
 Obviously that means you need a freeware subtitle editor, the best almost universally being said to be Aegisub, which is functional, but complicated.
https://www.videohelp.com/software/Aegisub
 The learning curve for Aegisub is so steep that I went back to text editing
until, in frustration, I tried the "second best" solution, which worked!
 This second-best freeware subtitle editor is the Subtitle Edit tool.
https://www.videohelp.com/software/Subtitle-Edit
 Subtitle Edit is much simpler and easier to make srt's than is Aegisub!
 One pitfall though with Subtitle Edit is it doesn't play well with MPC-BE.
Nor did it seem to work well with VLC, even though it's supposed to.
Nor did it work at all when I manually installed mpv which it recommended.
https://www.videohelp.com/software?d=mpv-x86_64-20181002.7z
 But when I let Subtitle Edit download mpv on its own, it worked fine.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/mpv-player-windows/
 Those are lessons learned I wanted to impart into this thread for you.
Once you have the subtitles, you still need to burn them into the MP4 file.
 For that, Paul's suggestion of ffmpeg has been working out fantastically.
Lessons learned on burning in the subtitles are just in the frill options.
 Burn subtitles, 30 point font:
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf "subtitles=input.srt:force_style='FontSize=30'" output_with_subtitles.mp4
 Burn subtitles, 34 point font:
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf "subtitles=input.srt:force_style='FontSize=34'" output_with_subtitles.mp4
 Burn subtitles, 34 point font, color BLACK:
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf "subtitles=input.srt:force_style='FontSize=34,PrimaryColour=&H000000'" output_with_black_subs.mp4
 Burn subtitles, 34 point font, color WHITE:
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf "subtitles=input.srt:force_style='FontSize=34,PrimaryColour=&HFFFFFF'" output_with_white_subs.mp4
 Burn subtitles, 34 point font, color RED:
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf "subtitles=input.srt:force_style='FontSize=34,PrimaryColour=&H0000FF'" output_with_red_subs.mp4
 Burn subtitles, 34 point font, color GREEN:
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf "subtitles=input.srt:force_style='FontSize=34,PrimaryColour=&H00FF00'" output_with_green_subs.mp4
 Burn subtitles, 34 point font, color BLUE:
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf "subtitles=input.srt:force_style='FontSize=34,PrimaryColour=&HFF0000'" output_with_blue_subs.mp4
 The only other thing that's often needed is to set the thumbnail.
What you can do is pick an exact frame you want to be that thumbnail.
 This will extract a single frame exactly 70 seconds into the video:
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -ss 00:01:10 -frames:v 1 thumbnail.jpg
 If desired, this will extract a thumbnail every five seconds:
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf "fps=1/5" thumb%04d.jpg
Once you choose the thumbnail, this will embed it into the metadata:
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -i thumbnail.jpg -map 0 -map 1 -c copy - disposition:v:1 attached_pic output.mp4
I hope these lessons learned can help someone else, as I very much appreciate the help Paul and others provided to me.

Alternatively you could spend US$49 and buy something like Magix Movie Studio 2025 and it would take possibly less time to achieve your aim than it did to type your post.
geoff
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geoff