What are Softsubs and How to Add or Remove Soft Subtitles Efficiently?

Soft subtitles, also known as softsubs or closed subtitles, are like closed captions that can be turned on and off during the video playback. They exist as independent files wrapped in the video container (MKV, MP4, and MOV), making it very different from hard subtitles whose subtitle text is irreversibly burned in the video frames. Softsubs are commonly used for fansubs. To display or close softsubs when playing a video requires a player with subtitle support. Such players include VLC, Windows Media Player, MX Player, and KMPlayer.

Soft subtitles can be very helpful when it comes to watching foreign movies or learning a foreign language. But sometimes, it could be a distraction, too. If you think there’s a need to add subtitles to MP4/MKV/MOV or remove soft subtitles from videos, read the following two parts that show you exactly the way to do it without re-encoding. Hope you’ll find it helpful.

To add softsubs to videos, we need the right program for this. Here, I’d suggest WonderFox HD Video Converter Factory Pro. It is a simple yet powerful program primarily designed for video conversions. But it’s also got a good support for subtitle adding/removing/extraction. The best thing is that it can help you soft code subtitles to MP4, MKV, or MOV without re-encoding, hence keeping the video and audio data intact. Now, I will demonstrate how to add subtitles to MP4 without encoding with this software.

Before start, please free download the software and install it on your PC.

Launch HD Video Converter Factory Pro and open the Converter. In the next window, click + Add Files to load the needed video into the program. Or you can directly drag and drop the file into the converter.

Tips: If you have multiple videos that you want to add subtitles to, you can add all these files into the converter for later batch processing at once.

Click the right-side format image to open the output format library. Go to the Video tab and select one of the three formats, MP4, MKV, or MOV (these are the only formats that support soft subtitles) as the output format.

In the main workspace, click the "+" button next to the "T" option to add your needed subtitles. You can add more than one subtitle file to create multiple subtitle tracks. Next, go to the H option and switch the subtitle type to CC (Here you can get more detailed information about each subtitle type and its supported format). Repeat this whole step to your every video if you have imported more than one video.

Note: If you have added multiple subtitles, remember to tick off all the subtitles you want in the "T" option after you’ve switched to CC subtitle type.

Click the ▼ button to specify an output path or leave it as default. Finally, hit Run to start the process. It should be done in an instant.

The software used in the last part can also help remove soft subs from your videos efficiently.

Download the software for free here and follow the steps below.

Run HD Video Converter Pro and open the Converter. Next, drag your needed video(s) into the program directly.

Unfold the output format list on the right side and select one output video format under the Video category. It is recommended that you keep the original video format so the lightning mode will be triggered to give you the fastest conversion without video re-encoding.

Under the video task, there is a row of buttons. Click the "T" option and unselect all the subtitles. Then you should see the subtitle option is disabled.

Finally, hit Run to start the conversion.