hardsubbing a video takes that long, because you have to reencode the whole video with the text on it,
There are 2 ways for you to do it
1. virtualdub + vsfilter + your subtitle file(*.srt,*.ssa,*.ass, other subtitle file)
but this can only let you encode according to what codec you have installed in your computer (H.264 encoding not supported in vdub or vdubmod)
2. megui + avisynth + vsfilter.dll + your subtitle file
with this you can encode your video stream in H.264 and put in matroska container or mp4 container (*.mkv,*.mp4)

hardsubbing subtitles is considered very simple if you compare it to make subtitles, timing, and making karaoke effects

WARNING: It is not advisable for you to hardsub subtitles to video because it will cause your video file to degrade in video quality, keep it softsubbed if possible, and if you do not know how to configure the settings for the encoder, the resulting encoded video would be larger than the source and is a waste of space and would drop the video quality by quite a lot that it will be easily noticeable.

This post has been edited by koayty: May 11 2007, 05:38 PM

if it is not 100% compliant, whats the use, you can't send that video to others and other decoders will start complaining about it, no one uses vfw for h264 anymore

tried it nearly a year ago, but that x264 vfw version sucks a lot

cli x264 encoders is already considered mainstream, no point using vfw that makes your video incompatible with other players