Arch Linux

scottro

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From: NYC

Registered: 2002-10-11

Posts: 466

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HandBrakeCLI and subtitles

At this point, I'm just looking for confirmation.  I've been googling, including Handbrake's bug forum, and find no mention of this.

I have mkv files which include subtitles.  Using mkvmerge I can confirm this.  These are srt files, I haven't tried with anything else at this point.  I have confirmed this on a few of them.  At simplest

HandBrakeCLI -i myfile.mkv -s 1 -o myfile.mp4

And the subtitle comes out garbled, with a bunch of garbage characters--the actual words will be there, but surrounded with symbols, what seems to be Cyrillic, and so on. 

This occurs with any version of HandBrakeCLI from 0.9.6 up.  (I wasn't able to build the source of 0.9.5 on Arch, but I have 0.9.5 on CentOS, and was able to install its rpm on Fedora).  I was able to confirm that the same files do handle subtitles properly if using HandBrakeCLI 0.9.5

The oddity to me is that I've seen no mention of this anywhere, and wonder if it's one of those Just Me(TM) issues.  I've only tested this with mkv files that have the subtitles included in the file.  Has anyone else run into this? 

I have tried the nightly builds (on Fedora).  I tried various other subtitle options, such as scan and subtitle-burn and -N for native language string.  I'm sure it's not fonts on the machine, because I was able to duplicate the behavior on a Fedora 17 machine with nightly build and svn, as well as have it work correctly when using an older 0.9.5 rpm.

Thanks for any input.  I may wind up cross-posting this question on Fedora and possibly Linuxquestions if I don't get a response, but it always seems to me that I get the quickest answers to somewhat obscure questions on these Arch forums.

The workaround, if anyone is interested, is to use mkvextract to get the srt file as a separate file, then use the --srt-file option of HandBrakeCLI.

Last edited by scottro (2012-08-24 17:45:43)