Burn Subtitles on Video With FFmpeg

By Johannes Filter
Published Jan 3, 2019

If you want to share a video on social media, it’s recommended to burn the subtitles directly onto the video. This way, people can understand what’s going on without having to unmute it. There are, for sure, fancy GUI programms to do so. I resort to a CLI tool to easily get the job done: FFmpeg.

Installation for Mac

brew install ffmpeg --enable-libass

Usage

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -filter_complex "subtitles=subs.srt:force_style='FontName=Roboto,FontSize=32,OutlineColour=&H80000000,MarginV=60,PrimaryColour=&H00FFFFFF'"  output.mp4

I tried to create a shadow around the subtitles but failed because it overlaps if you have more than one line.

Further Literature