Extract SUBRIP when looking for subtitles, not on the fly

[Alefielm 7]

Hi! Currently the subrip subtitles are extrated on the fly when playing from, for example, an MKV container.
the process is slow, don't show the subtitles from start, and if the file is 4k/1080p on a slow server (ej Rpi) it could timeout and leave us without subtitles.

What I am thinking about:
- When searching for subtitles on open subtitles, etc, if there is no standard (srt) file found extract it using something like this:

mkvextract tracks video.mkv 3:video.srt

I'm currently manually running this for each file with subrip embedded subtitles and it works like charm, and I'm sure that the subtitles are correct.

There are multiple tools that get the job done, I choose this because it's open source and currently maintained.

https://mkvtoolnix.download/

Thanks!

[Luke 37057]

Hi, yes this idea has come up before and it's possible for the future. Thanks.

[Alefielm 7]

Thank you!

[Guest]

Are you saying to extract them and save them as in external SRT, like to the video folder? 

Playing with tool you listed and gMKVExtractGUI to extract a few. .SUP seems to be useless though.

I have installed Subscene but need to test it still, I quit bothering with OpenSubtitles ( personal choice, for me it never works anymore ).

I have all of the ones I used with MPC-HC in the past which works great and seem to be the best for me. SRT, IDX, SMI, etc...

Edited March 7, 2021 by Guest

[Alefielm 7]

6 hours ago, Hxemby001 said:

Are you saying to extract them and save them as in external SRT, like to the video folder? 

Playing with tool you listed and gMKVExtractGUI to extract a few. .SUP seems to be useless though.

I have installed Subscene but need to test it still, I quit bothering with OpenSubtitles ( personal choice, for me it never works anymore ).

I have all of the ones I used with MPC-HC in the past which works great and seem to be the best for me. SRT, IDX, SMI, etc...

I don't understand if this is on topic, I used that tool to extract "SUBRIP" from the MKV container to the video directory with SRT format, works great

[Guest]

It was a question of;  if you meant for it to say,  or was stating that it would be a good idea to extract when scanning the library and saved to the directory before being streamed or 'on the fly', in the form of SRT or whatever format. And also that your right about it being better without extraction during transcoding and other operations at the same time. I guess I was not sure if you were wanting it to be requested/extracted from the file differently or if you wanted them to be pre-extracted and saved for future use within the library.

[Alefielm 7]

2 hours ago, Hxemby001 said:

It was a question of;  if you meant for it to say,  or was stating that it would be a good idea to extract when scanning the library and saved to the directory before being streamed or 'on the fly', in the form of SRT or whatever format. And also that your right about it being better without extraction during transcoding and other operations at the same time. I guess I was not sure if you were wanting it to be requested/extracted from the file differently or if you wanted them to be pre-extracted and saved for future use within the library.

Ok, second one. Pre extracted for future use

[neik 837]

16 hours ago, Alefielm said:

Currently the subrip subtitles are extrated on the fly when playing from, for example, an MKV container.

This is with internal text SUBRIPs, what about graphical VOBSUB/PGSSUB, are they also extracted first?

[Luke 37057]

8 hours ago, neik said:

This is with internal text SUBRIPs, what about graphical VOBSUB/PGSSUB, are they also extracted first?

No, those get burned in with transcoding if the client app doesn't support them.

[Guest]

I think those two, and one I extracted with a SUP extension were ones I couldn't convert.. Good reason to still have Subscene plugin, or download them manually.

[rbjtech 4257]

It's a little more complicated than your first example.... 

I do this as part of my file 'pre-processing' - as I prefer to use the embedded .srt file vs anything from opensubtitles etc as it's likely a perfect sync match.

However, there is no direct tool out there (that I can find) that extracts just ALL subtitles without probing the file to compile an extraction list.

I cheat and use eac3to to extract all streams (incl all subtitles) and then copy any .srt files in the language I'm after - and simply delete the rest.  But this is obviously not very efficient.

Someday I'll get around to writing a script to do it properly using ffprobe to compile a list of all the SRT tracks and then ffmpeg to extract them...