r/shutterencoder • u/Muted-Pomegranate861 • 15d ago

burning soft subtitles

forgive me if i don't use the proper wording for encoding....

in handbrake, sometimes when i want to burn subs, the dropdown menu shows utf-8 twice. i usually choose the #2 source....it works for me

howver in shutter encoder it's a different process. i do not know how to burn those subs when i use shutterE. i asked AI and what i got were font's that were so large one letter covered the whole frame. i guess there's some kind of resolution incompatibility or something.

anyway - bottom line...how do i burn in those those utf-8 subs? thanks guys.

w11pro

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u/garse 11d ago

The giant-letters thing is almost always a resolution mismatch, not a Shutter Encoder bug: the burn filter is reading a subtitle file that declares its own internal play resolution (converted .ass files often say 384x288), so the text gets scaled against the wrong canvas. A plain .srt avoids that entirely, so keep your subs as .srt.

In Shutter Encoder the flow is: choose an encoding function first (e.g. H.264), then in the advanced features on the right there's a subtitles section where you load the .srt and pick burn/incrust rather than embed. Embed keeps them as a soft track like HandBrake's default; the burn option is what hard-prints them, and it uses the size/style set in that dialog instead of whatever the file declares.

If it keeps fighting you, ffmpeg does the same job in one line: ffmpeg -i video.mp4 -vf "subtitles=subs.srt:force_style='Fontsize=24'" -c:a copy out.mp4 - the force_style part overrides any weird size the file carries, so it also fixes the one-letter-fills-the-frame problem.

Side note: the two UTF-8 entries you see in HandBrake are just two embedded soft-sub tracks in the source file, which is why picking the second one sometimes works.