Extract subtitle from mkv files

Question

The problem is that videoplayers in Ubuntu have a problem with integrated central european subtitles.The solution is to extract them. Does anyone knows if there is a command in the terminal or a program to extract the subtitle from a mkv file?

Answer 1

Install mkvtoolnix with sudo apt-get install mkvtoolnix.

Run from terminal: mkvextract tracks <your_mkv_video> <track_numer>:<subtitle_file.srt>

Use mkvinfo to get information about tracks.

Using this utility you can extract any track, even audio or video.

Answer 2

Answer of Cornelius finally worked for me, but some things were not obvious.

Install mkvtoolnix

sudo apt-get install mkvtoolnix

Detect track numbers

mkvmerge -i some_movie.mkv

Sample output:

File 'some_movie.mkv': container: Matroska
Track ID 0: video (MPEG-4p10/AVC/h.264)
Track ID 1: audio (AC-3/E-AC-3)
Track ID 2: subtitles (SubRip/SRT)
Chapters: 12 entries
Global tags: 2 entries

Extract tracks

Syntax:

mkvextract tracks <your_mkv_video> <track_number>:<subtitle_file.srt>

Note, that you can't have any spaces between <track_number>: and <subtitle_file.srt>.

Example:

mkvextract tracks "some_movie.mkv" 2:some_movie_subs.srt

Answer 3

you can use mkvtoolnix .

sudo apt-get install mkvtoolnix

Another tip now because mkv files may contain many subtitles , so the tip is this script that you can search for the language you want , so for example if you want English it will download just English .

Script :

#!/bin/bash
# Extract subtitles from each MKV file in the given directory

# If no directory is given, work in local dir
if [ "$1" = "" ]; then
  DIR="."
else
  DIR="$1"
fi

# Get all the MKV files in this dir and its subdirs
find "$DIR" -type f -name '*.mkv' | while read filename
do
  # Find out which tracks contain the subtitles
  mkvmerge -i "$filename" | grep 'subtitles' | while read subline
  do
    # Grep the number of the subtitle track
    tracknumber=`echo $subline | egrep -o "[0-9]{1,2}" | head -1`

    # Get base name for subtitle
    subtitlename=${filename%.*}

    # Extract the track to a .tmp file
    `mkvextract tracks "$filename" $tracknumber:"$subtitlename.srt.tmp" > /dev/null 2>&1`
    `chmod g+rw "$subtitlename.srt.tmp"`


    # Do a super-primitive language guess: ENGLISH
    langtest=`egrep -ic ' you | to | the ' "$subtitlename".srt.tmp`
    trimregex=""



    # Check if subtitle passes our language filter (10 or more matches)
    if [ $langtest -ge 10 ]; then
      # Regex to remove credits at the end of subtitles (read my reason why!)
      `sed 's/\r//g' < "$subtitlename.srt.tmp" \
        | sed 's/%/%%/g' \
        | awk '{if (a){printf("\t")};printf $0; a=1; } /^$/{print ""; a=0;}' \
        | grep -iv "$trimregex" \
        | sed 's/\t/\r\n/g' > "$subtitlename.srt"`
      `rm "$subtitlename.srt.tmp"`
      `chmod g+rw "$subtitlename.srt"`
    else
      # Not our desired language: add a number to the filename and keep anyway, just in case
      `mv "$subtitlename.srt.tmp" "$subtitlename.$tracknumber.srt" > /dev/null 2>&1`
    fi
  done
done

Save this script nameyouwant.sh and make it executable

Now in terminal change directory to script folder and write ./nameyouwant.sh /pathtosave