What software to extract subtitles?

AnotherAussie · Post by **AnotherAussie** » Fri Feb 07, 2020 12:20 am

What software is everyone using to extract subtitles from recordings? I've tried a dozen different programs but none work for .mpg files.

I can play the recording in VLC media player and choose "Teletext subtitles - [English]" and I get the full teletext subtitles as they appear on my television, including all the different colours and text positions, etc., in the proper ISO-8859-9 encoding.

The problem is, I need to edit my recordings (trim the start & end, etc.) and all the video editing software I've tried strips the subtitles out of the exported video, whether I re-encode or use lossless export.

I have been able to extract the subtitles by muxing the .mpg file with MKVmerge, then extracting the subtitles from the resulting .mkv file, but MKVmerge seems to convert the subtitles to an .srt file with UTF-8 encoding and I lose all the text colours and formatting.

Is there any software out there that can extract the Teletext subtitles directly from the .mpg file?

tarmacalastair · Post by **tarmacalastair** » Sat Nov 21, 2020 4:54 pm

Do you need to extract the subtitles? Or would you be happy to trim and edit your recordings while keeping the embedded subtitle stream within the video files.

If the latter, then I've been using Lossless Cut for a while and I asked the author a while ago to include the subtitle stream when cutting segments. This was added earlier this year so now meets my needs (https://community.vboxcomm.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=460). I don't re-encode at all, just trim the bits I don't need so it's pretty fast.

It's available at https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut/releases . I use Linux but it's available for Windows and Mac as well. Takes a bit of getting used to but does the trick for me. Hopefully you'll find it useful too.

AnotherAussie · Post by **AnotherAussie** » Sat Nov 21, 2020 10:12 pm

Thanks!

I'll certainly give it a look as I could use it elsewhere, but I usually re-encode the (enormous) .mpg files into .mp4 anyway, trimming and removing ads at the same time just to save on disk space.

vizer · Post by **vizer** » Thu Feb 04, 2021 5:29 pm

You can use TS Doctor to extract subtitles from dvb signal.

vizer · Post by **vizer** » Mon Feb 15, 2021 6:23 pm

Another option is VideoSubFinder.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/videosubfinder/

AnotherAussie · Post by **AnotherAussie** » Tue Feb 16, 2021 7:51 am

Thanks vizer, that VideoSubFinder program looks interesting.

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