Ripping subtitles to srt file

[Peterduke]

Does anyone know how to rip the subtitles from a 4k mkv to an srt file?

[DukeFleed]

You need an extractor, on Linux I use Mkv-extractor-qt5, or gMKVExtractGui, mkvextract gui from the MKVToolNix suite. With this you extract the subs, then you have to save them in subrip. I use SubTitle Edit for this, but you also need OCR software, again on Linux I use tesseract.

[Woodstock]

SRT is a text format file. Subtitles on a Bluray or 4K BD are a graphic format (almost universally), so you need to do a graphic-to-text conversion (the OCR step Dukefleed mentions). That is the most troublesome part, because the text recognition isn't 100%, especially when dealing with fancy text.

Another consideration is WHY you want to do the conversion; there are places where you can pull SRT subtitles from that are already converted, if you're looking for languages not included on the disk. They may have been created for (say) the DVD.

[Peterduke]

SRT is a text format file. Subtitles on a Bluray or 4K BD are a graphic format (almost universally), so you need to do a graphic-to-text conversion (the OCR step Dukefleed mentions). That is the most troublesome part, because the text recognition isn't 100%, especially when dealing with fancy text.

Another consideration is WHY you want to do the conversion; there are places where you can pull SRT subtitles from that are already converted, if you're looking for languages not included on the disk. They may have been created for (say) the DVD.

My issue is when I rip a 4k and preserve the Dolby vision using HQ 4k profile, it only allows forces subtitles and they get burnt in to the final image, hence why I wanted to rip them separately,

[Woodstock]

That would be a limitation of using the MP4 container; it does not support image-based subtitles, although the handbrake people use a method that allows VOBSUB (dvd) subtitles to be included. To my knowledge, no one has come up with a way to do that for PGS subtitles in a general case, which is actually strange.

Does your player not support MKV files? More of them do, nowadays, to the point where I stopped making MP4 versions of my videos.

[Drybonz]

When I can't find a good .srt to download, I use a program called "Subtitle Edit" that does a great job.

[alexmorph3us]

Or you can use BDSup2Sub to convert PGS subtitles into VOBSub for compatibility without loosing the quality or their original position that they usually have in the movie.

[Chetwood]

Since Vobsub uses less colors than PGS, you usually do lose a bit of quality but it's usually acceptable. Since PGS are better/bigger, they are easier to OCR than Vobsub, so I personally always go with SRT. Losing positioning doesn't matter that much IMO.