Many times a foreign language video or movie appears very interesting but we cannot understand anything without the use of subtitles in the English languages (or some other language that you understand). Fortunately, the VLC media player makes it very easy to search for and download the subtitles for any of the videos or movies that you can play in the VLC player. But all that VLC media player does is download the subtitles in the SUB or SRT file formats. In order to use these subtitles in the future, you must keep these files in the same folder as the video file itself. What if you want to merge the subtitles inside the video files themselves?
This can be accomplished easily using the open-source tool FFmpeg. You can download the Windows binaries from the FFmpeg website. After extracting the downloaded archive, you are ready to use it in Windows. You can just open a command prompt window (press Win+X and select Command Prompt). Then give the following commands (assuming that ffmpeg.exe file is located in the C:\ffmpeg\bin\folder):
ffmpeg.exe -i subtitles.srt subtitles.ass
ffmpeg.exe -i video.mp4 -vf ass=subtitles.ass video-new.mp4
As you can see the subtitles file is subtitles.srt and the video file is video.mp4. The new video file generated is video-new.mp4. You can change these names and parameters depending on your own video files and subtitles files. And since FFmpeg can handle all kinds of video and audio formats, you do not have to worry about the type of video files you have and whether you have any codecs installed for them.
The resulting file will have the subtitles merged inside the video stream and cannot be separated in the future. You won’t be able to turn off these subtitles when watching the video in any video player or on your TV.
You can download FFmpeg from https://www.ffmpeg.org/.