How to Hardcode a Sinhala Subtitle File to a Video

Mostly I watch movies on my computer. But today I wanted to watch it on my Samsung LED TV. I also wanted to watch it with Sinhalese subtitles. Finding Sinhalese subtitles on internet wasn’t so hard, but getting it to display on TV cost me more than 6 hours.

So I wanted to watch this movie with some friends and wanted Sinhala subtitles to make sure everyone enjoys it. I downloaded subtitles for the movie and tried to play it on TV with a USB stick. But all I saw was question marks instead of Sinhalese letters. Soon I found out that the TV does not support Sinhala Unicode.

So I had 2 options left. Either cast it to TV using a wifi casting device like ezCast or hardcode subtitles to video using software. Since I don’t own an ezcast and it’s somewhat rare to find in Sri Lanka, I decided to hardcode subtitles to the video file.

There were some free subtitle hardcoding software available, but none of them worked for me. The issue with most software I found was that it doesn’t support Sinhala Unicode. Sinhalese letters weren’t in correct order and were hard to read.

I was able to get letters in correct order with VLC Player, but output video quality was lower than original. Plus conversion with VLC player was very unstable. Then I tried hardcoding with Any Video Converter and Xilisoft Video Converter. Both failed to give me what I was looking for. After 6 hours of surfing, installing and uninstalling, I found the piece of software that does the trick. It was Video to Video Converter. This free converter gave me subtitle hardcoded video without adding much to the file size. And output video quality was as same as the original video quality.

So Here’s how I did it with Video to Video Converter, I’m going to assume that you have a video file and a subtitle file with extension SRT or SSA.

First download and install Video to Video Converter. Open it and click ‘Add Video’. A new window will pop up. Browse your computer and select the video you want to be converted.

Once you selected video and hit ‘Open’, another window will open. There you’ll be asked to select an output profile for your video. I usually go with MP4. So click it and set quality to ‘Same as Source” from the right sidebar.

Now scroll down to the subtitles section of sidebar and click the empty field next to line that reads ‘Subtitle File’. A little button will appear. Clicking on it will open a window where you can browse for your subtitle file.

Select subtitle file for video and click ‘Open’. Then click ‘OK’ and you’ll be returned to Video to Video main window. There you have to click on your video file and then click ‘Convert’.

Conversion will take few minutes depending on your video size and format. And after that few minutes, you can enjoy subtitle hardcoded video on your TV with Sinhala subtitles.