My Loss Is Your Information, MeGUI Says Yes We Can
A slightly different approach with this post. Because I don’t want to write five pages worth of nonsense. You hear that, you train freak?
Today’s Recipe:
How to encode hardsubs for your PS3/Xbox/PSP/iCrap/etc.
What you actually want:
Convert softsub MKV container videos into MP4 container and hardsubs. Partly because mp4box kind of sucks, and I haven’t had the time to figure everything out with softsubs yet. Also, it’s just easier. Anyways, you can ignore all that stuff and just think “I CAN HAS Xbox/PSP/PS3 ANIMU?”
Also, solly OSX and Leenox guys, dis for PC cats only.
What you need:
- CCCP - Just because it’s easy. No other reason. You might already have this.
- AviSynth - I don’t know why MeGUI doesn’t include this.
- MeGUI - I had the most success with this. There are other tools that do the same. MeGUI gives you some false sense of superiority in terms of options you have, as if using it makes you feel smarter than you really are.
- WinAmp or Nero or something that has an AAC encoder library. AAC is more or less required these days. All you need is the library file, however, so you may not need to install those tools.
Install those things. One more setup task you want to do is copy the AAC library file over to the MeGUI tools folder, which can be found where you installed MeGUI by defualt. You can also set up MeGUI and change the path to the AAC encoder.
Also, set this in your CCCP settings–
Do eet, doooo eeeet:
Load up MeGUI, make sure you got some presets that you can use and they are also the ones you want to use, if it’s asking you to update.
Use MeGUI’s AVS editor, load your file, look at the popup, scroll around to see how the subs look. Y’know, just in case. You also have the option to resize and crop, if you need it.
Close that popup once you’re done, and then save the script. MeGUI will automatically load that script you’ve just made via the AVS script editor. Another popup will automatically come up and it looks just like the one you closed a moment ago. You can close that again. Or crop or whatever if you need to and haven’t done it.
In the main MeGUI window you can put in stuff like “video output” path and whatever. Old cat for non-nubs. But you should select the preset you want to use. Like, maybe, something for iPods if you want to use it on an iPod, straightforward stuff.
At the bottom half of the little MeGUI window is the audio portion. You just want to give it, as source, the MKV file directly. Make sure also the output is not the same filename as the video output, but they could be in the same directory. Select a preset that makes sense.
If you have questions about presets, this is a quickie reference (but you probably just want to read sections 4 and 5). That guide also contains a blurb on setting up your AAC encoder (section 2, but it is a little dated).
Once you’ve double checked your presets and paths, click on AutoEncode. It’ll then give you some popups. Click yes or ok the suggestions it might have throughout the process, generally you want those. At some point (perhaps immediately) you will see a popup that asks you about file size or whatever. Select preset default (so you don’t get a 700MB file out of your 200MB MKV), and click QUEUE.
There might be some other advisory popups that you can agree to, but that’s the hard part.
You can now repeat this process as many times as you want (zero is a good number of times to repeat it) for any other files you want to encode and put into queue. To start the encoding, just click on the Queue tab and click START. Self-explanatory right?
What?
A couple notes. First off, if you have a problem with this guide, feel free to ask me any questions related to the guide. But I am no way qualified to help you troubleshoot complications arising from MeGUI. In other words, if something doesn’t work and you don’t know why, you can tell me but I probably can’t give you an answer. To help yourself, please use a search engine as FAQ-worthy stuff is often documented and easily found. Doom9 forums, probably one of the better digital video forums out there, is probably another place to check.
But even before you run into a problem (and invariably someone does), what I recommend is find a short clip of something, test this guide out using that, and test out the various presets you’d like to use. The resulting clips can be quickly encoded (because it is short) and easily copied over to whatever device you have. Win for you and win for … you again. Plus, if you are curious you can even tweak your settings and test your settings via those clips.
I was reading an article off Wired lately, and it talked about Comcast’s problem with net neutrality and QoS and crap like that. What struck me was that one very common group of people that traverse this grey area of do-it-yourself, power-user video encoding is us anime folks. And the fact is that many of us handle digital fansubs on a regular basis, streaming or bittorrent or IRC or whatever. There’s this whole technological evolution underneath the cries for “oh physical media is dead blah blah blah” that I find quite facinating. Like all the people who think Blu-Ray is dead, I mean, what are they on? It’s that potent. And it is useful technology if you can harness it. No longer do I have to spend gigabytes of hard drive space for my convention videos, lol. And region encoding on DVDs are like nothing (a vital tool for importers). It’s just the tip of the iceberg, beyond just copying DVDs you get from Netflix or Redbox.
I wish it was possible to work around region encoding on Blu-ray as easily as it is on DVD.
Actually I wish they’d ditched the outdated, anti-competitive concept outright. Or at least hadn’t put Australia in a different region to the US and Japan. :(
I hear ya.
Thanks o obtuse one! Nice to have it all in one system - I had about six programs on the go before to cover for the various formats.
OS X guide:
1. install perian
2. find encoding app using quicktime
3. it works
BTW, you boned the Avi Synth link. Otherwise, thanks a ton, I’ve been wanting to do this forever.
Thanks for the catch
HI .. IF I ALREADY HAVE ENCODED MKV .. JUST WANT TO ADD THE SUBTITLE ..
I dont want to use the mkvmerge .. i want just to add subtitle without
encoding ,, is that possible ?
It is. But PS3 hates it and it wouldn’t play. MP4 with soft subs is generally loathed by most players, so you might want to check before you try it.
It’s also a couple steps more complicated. You have to take the subs out of the MKV with something like MKVextract first, and then add it to the muxing later on (forgot where the option is in MeGUI). And turn off autoload VSFilter.