social.noyu.me

making hardsubbed anime clips with ffmpeg is a huge pain i don't recommend it. it doesn't support seeking properly so it wastes cycles rendering 20 minutes to /dev/null, and the fonts are plain because i didn't extract the files from the mkv. i shouldn't even have to do that.

but for my own future reference:

ffmpeg -i foo.mkv foo.ass
ffmpeg -i foo.mkv -vf ass=foo.ass -pix_fmt yuv420p foo.mp4
ffmpeg -t 2:00 -i clip.mp4 -vcodec copy -acodec copy -sn -map_chapters -1 -map_metadata -1 clip_clean.mp4

got this wonderful reply over on twitter with the magic incantation, quoting here so i won't lose it:

ooh I know this, you can do it in one step, have it read the fonts from the mkv, and seek relatively quickly

ffmpeg -ss -to -copyts -i in.mkv -ss -to -vf "subtitles='in.mkv'" -pix_fmt yuv420p out.mp4

(the nested quotes are loadbearing)

(https://twitter.com/_aps0/status/1853080362982727703)

@hikari oh that’s a good trick. My setup to fix things was to copy the subs to a separate file before clipping.

@hikari oh gods, sudden flashbacks to teen-us fucking around attempting to convert specifically the afk fansub of Lucky Star to, um, ".dpg" using <sketchy Windows GUI wrappers from back in the day for what was almost certainly also ffmpeg>

@hikari oh right, half of the janky tools were probably ffmpeg wrappers while the other half operated via... DirectShow

gods why is "media + computers" a perpetual dumpsterfire? it cannot be *this* difficult to wrangle "lol hi we combined a Fourier-like transform with some entropy coding"

@hikari out of curiosity this made me dig out my old scripts from 2010, when I used to watch anime on my w760i... and it turns out I had been using mencoder (-vf harddup) for the subtitles and encoding (to mpeg4 at the time), but ffmpeg for muxing to mp4, because *neither* of them could do both tasks properly

@hikari mpv is much better at this, and there's a lua script (misleadingly called "mpv-webm" despite supporting better formats) that makes it very easy

@rcombs oh that makes sense. honestly though i'll probably see if there's some way to do it with vlc. vlc's convert/stream function sucks ass but sometimes it's handy

this scene haunts me sometimes when i feel like i seem to overlap a surprising amount with someone else's tastes. i have to ask myself if i'm sure even have taste… usually i do! but