Can I just ADD a subtitle without changing movie's size/quality?

[theinkdon]

Hi all, new here, and pretty new to Handbrake. I downloaded it a few weeks ago and was using it to make some movies smaller (from 5+ GB to ~1.5GB) to put on a flash drive for traveling and whatnot. That worked great, and I even had to include subtitles (srt's) in some of the files.], so I figured out how to do that.

Here's what I want to do now:
I have a movie file that's either mp4 or mkv.
I also have it's corresponding .srt file

I want to just ADD the subtitle file to the movie file as a SOFT subtitle, so probably the output type should be mkv.
I believe I've used mkvmerge to do this in the past and it's been quick.
The only way I know to do it with HB is to import the srt then "process" the video. I don't see any way to tell HB to "leave the video part alone, just add in the srt file." Maybe I don't understand the process well enough, but I think that's what Matroska is all about, just bundling different file types inside a container.

I've searched these forums and all over the web and can't find the answer.
I've even said, "Okay, let me start with an mkv, add its srt, then use the Avg Bitrate setting to choose a bitrate that will in the end approximate the movie file's original size, and output it all as an mkv." And of course not choose to Burn In the subs. But HB seems to still want to re-encode the movie file and take an hour or so to do so.

Is there a simple way to do what I want to do with Handbrake?

Thanks,
Mike

[BradleyS]

No, you want a (re)muxer such as mkvmerge or the MKVToolNix GUI. For MP4, Subler on Mac is nice.

HandBrake is a transcoding tool; it always reencodes video.

[theinkdon]

So that explains why I couldn't do it.
Appreciate the info. Mods, you can close this thread.
Thanks,
Mike