After a few hours of googling, and turning up pretty much nothing; I figured I ought to make a note of this somewhere. I often find myself in the situation where I’ve just downloaded some asian movie (I’m a huge fan of Asian Extreme -think along the lines of Old Boy, Ishii the killer, etc-, and, I really want to be able to watch what I’ve downloaded on my TV) and it doesn’t have the subtitles embedded in the avi file (and no, before you suggest it, I will NOT watch dubbed crap). Microsoft, unfortunately, doesn’t think anyone in the world would want to watch something with subtitles, so this isn’t a feature of the Xbox360. My Xbox is hooked up to a NAS box which has all my music/tv/movies on it, and this box runs a /very/ minimal install of ubuntu - ~150mb in total.

So, down to business. You’ll need transcode installed, along with mplayer, then it’s a simple case of:

transcode -i videofile.avi -x mplayer=-sub subfile.xxx -o outputfile.avi -y xvid

There are other output formats, but I use xvid, since it’s supported by the Xbox. It takes a while longer than just straight transcoding, but it’s worth it to not have to watch it on my laptop.