The scenario: you downloaded some cool anime/samurai flick/bollywood musical, and you want to play it on your game console, but it has subtitles in separate .sub or .idx files. The solution if you run windows is to go visit the sub2divx homepage. It’s a little app that lets you bake those subtitles into the avi file so it will play on the consoles with the subtitles. There are some dependencies to get this running but the sub2divx page helpfully lists and links to everything you need. Just dump it all into one folder, point the app at the avi file and sub file, and off it goes. It’s fast too, a 2 hour movie broken across 2 avi files took me less than 10 minutes. It’s also flexible – you can tune the color, shadow, and highlight colors of the subtitles, adjust their position on the screen, and choose the font. It’s a great little tool.

[update 8-2010: after two reports that the tripod site this is hosted on is has a version of the software infected with a trojan, I've removed the link. Here's a better link to investigate the software over on videohelp.com. Be cautious and run your virus checker against your download, and don't grab it from the author's site. Or even better, read up on this and pick another tool - I've been using PS3 media server and no longer need to deal with this]