How to extract and merge hard-coded subtitle in a video

Question

I downloaded a movie that has hard-coded subtitles, for some reason I don't like the font of the subtitles :P . But since it's hard-coded inside the movie, I can't extract the subtitle with MkvExtract even though I converted to mkv format.

I searched for the solution online and doesn't seems to help me with it, is it possible to extract hard-coded subtitles? By the way, I also want to know how can I hard-code subtitles in a video.

Thanks in advance!

Solution 1

It's impossible. Merged subtitles are a part of the video. You can't just remove them because the computer cannot distinguish between the subtitle part and the picture part. Even if it could, it would not be able to recover what is lost underneath the subtitle.

So, how does MkvExtract work and why it didn't work? MKV is a more advanced video container. Simple containers like AVI can contain only audio and video. MKV is much more advanced, it can include multiple audio tracks (for example both stereo and 5.1, you can choose which one you prefer) and subtitles. MKV subtitles aren't merged into the video; they are plain text rendered on video during playback. Because they are already distinct, MkvExtract can extract these to a separate file.

Your converted file didn't have real subtitles, but only merged ones, so there was nothing to extract.

Solution 2

With the program Subrip you can import hard-coded vob's, however, it is image-based, so sometimes you got manually to improve the text. So, it is time-consuming, if the text is not clearly shown.

Comments

[Admin]

Incorrect and off-topic! Subrip can perform OCR on bitmap subtitles, not hard-coded ones. There is a huge difference there.

[Gustavo Rodrigues]

@FleetCommand What? The SubRip webpage says: "Subrip 1.4+ can also rip subs from avi with burned in/hardcoded/permanent subtitles."

[Admin]

@GustavoRodrigues Is this the first time in your life that you see advertisement? Any way, it says "AVI", but the OP wants "MKV".

[Gustavo Rodrigues]

@FleetCommand And you cannot convert MKV to AVI? Would you not use Tesseract on a WebP just because its wiki don't says nothing about this format? Of course you just need to convert it to a supported format.

[Gustavo Rodrigues]

@FleetCommand You're right. I don't know why, but you're right. I will stop here before a mod comes saying to stop discussing in answer comments.

[PathToLife]

It's possible now with today's technology, of course the subtitles can't look like capatcha challenges, but pytesseract is a good bet

[gronostaj]

@Pathfinder OCRing subs from video is relatively easy, erasing them from video is the impossible part.