Remove hardcoded subtitles in VLC on Windows or Mac - Anyone?

@Abhishek Rawal • 14 Feb, 2015 If subtitles can be removed, it's not hard-coded.

@Ankita Katdare • 14 Feb, 2015 True. I wish there was a work around. Another software to remove hardcoded text from videos, may be? I have heard there are apps to 'extract' hardcoded subtitle text from a .avi / .mkv / .mp4 file. Will have to search. ☕👀😖

@lal • 14 Feb, 2015 Hardcoded subtitles are like 'burned' in to the frames. Removing them is like removing the character's face from the played back frames, which is exactly identical to editing a picture and removing/replacing some part of it through a photo editing software like Adobe Photoshop or Gimp. Trouble here is, in a movie there could be 24 to 30 or even more frames played per second. Editing each frame individually (many hundreds of thousands of them) could give a chance, but with a deterioration in quality and flow!

@Ankita Katdare • 14 Feb, 2015 @lal Any idea about what is the technical process of hard coding subtitles in a video file? Is it done during post production?

@Abhishek Rawal • 14 Feb, 2015 • 2 likes

Ankita Katdare

@lal Any idea about what is the technical process of hard coding subtitles in a video file? Is it done during post production?

You can use applications like Handbrake, Avidemux,etc. to hardcode subtitles into video file. All you have to select "Burned in" option to do so.
If you prefer CLI, you can do it with ffmpeg :

ffmpeg -i video.format -vf subtitles=xyz.srt out.format

You can even use subtitles from mkv container to your video. Refer : https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki
I don't remember more.

@Jatin Kumar • 14 Feb, 2015 • 1 like there are video editing applications which are used to remove watermarks from the video ,may be that will help😨👀
https://compression.ru/video/logo_removal/index_en.html
try it

@Ankita Katdare • 14 Feb, 2015 Yes. Thanks for the share. That looks like worth a shot. I will find a smaller (under 20mb) hardcoded subtitle video file and see if this helps. That's a lot of efforts though. ☕

@Ankita Katdare • 14 Feb, 2015 I searched again to see if filters work, but most of them seem to say that it's simply not working as intended. Also, when on one of the forums, a person asked if he/she can make the color of the text transparent, the response cracked me up 😁😁 -

Your best bet is to cover up that part of the screen with some electrical tape so you don't have to look at them.

😘

@Ankita Katdare • 29 May, 2015 A lot of people are reaching out to me on social media asking if I have found a solution to this. Sadly, I haven't. Sadly, there isn't a solution to this.

If the subtitles are hard-coded, it's like they are a part of the movie. A part of the scene. No way to remove that.

@Sri Ram • 12 Jul, 2015 This worked for me with slight blurring where the inbuilt sub track displayed,
https://www.idealshare.net/video-converter/how-to-remove-subtitles-from-mkv.html
Much more tolerable than two sets of subtitles (Portuguese:embedded and SRT:English).

@Ankita Katdare • 02 Aug, 2015 @Sri Ram Seems a bit harsh to me to remove the part of the video surrounding the subtitle. There could be elements there that aren't worth missing. However, cropping it out is the only available solution. Only how many will choose to do it I wonder..

@Paawann • 10 Oct, 2015 • 1 like well, contact the Hardcoder who did this to you, and ask him ," bro, always keep a non hard coded copy on torrent site."

@Ankita Katdare • 04 Dec, 2015 There are some freeware available on the internet that claim to remove hardcoded subtitles. Some of them say the overall video quality will be reduced and others say they will block that part of the screen.

I think that since there's no sure-short way of removing hardcoded subtitles. But if you can't wait to watch the movie/video, you can be smart and add one subtitle on top of other with a different layer background. This will make it easy to read the new subtitles.

If you are running VLC (the most used software), you have settings to position the new subtitles wherever you want. In fact, VLC allows you to change the subtitle's text color, text's position, font size, font family as well as the overlay effects.

Here's how you can do it:

1. Go to Tools on the menu bar and hit on 'Preferences'.
2. In the window that pops up, click 'Subtitles & OSD' option from the left sidebar. (OSD stands for On Screen Display)
3. Under Display settings, you will see an option called 'Force Subtitle Position'. Here you can enter value in pixels where each pixel defines the position of subtitle from the window's margins.

Happy binge watching, folks! 👍

@justfaced • 12 Jan, 2016 You can use Avdshare Video Converter to removing subtitles from MKV with the help of an MKV Subtitle Remover named MKV Subtitle Remover.

@Ankita Katdare • 09 Feb, 2016

justfaced

You can use Avdshare Video Converter to removing subtitles from MKV with the help of an MKV Subtitle Remover named MKV Subtitle Remover.

I sure do hope that this is not an advertisement for the service. There are various ways to remove subtitles from a .MKV file if they are just soft subtitles. There are online subtitle removers for all .avi, .mp4 and .mkv files. Removing hardcoded subs is a different ball game entirely. It's a highly tedious process and may result in deterioration of video quality.

@Ankit0070 • 07 Mar, 2016 Hey Ankita i m also facing same problem...still i have'nt found any software that can be used to remove hard coded Chinese subtitles... hey guys plzzzz help me

@emirwati • 13 Apr, 2016 I did a little search of this problem and I found no clear cut solution yet. (1) You could crop the part of the film where the subtitles appear, but losing that portion of the image using, for example, iDealshare VideoGo. (2) You could enable new subtitles on top of the old ones and try different fonts, colours and sizes. (3) You could offset the new subtitles to a new area of the screen. (4) My best bet is to download another version of the film.

@emirwati • 13 Apr, 2016 I did a little search for this problem and I found no clear cut solution yet. (1) You could crop the part of the film where the subtitles appear, but losing that portion of the image using, for example, iDealshare VideoGo. (2) You could enable new subtitles on top of the old ones and try different fonts, colours and sizes. (3) You could offset the new subtitles to a new area of the screen. (4) The best option is possibly to download another version of the film.

@Ankita Katdare • 13 Apr, 2016 @emirwati Did you try that solution?

@emirwati • 14 Apr, 2016 • 1 like Yes, I did; better try a new download.

Ankita Katdare

@emirwati Did you try that solution?

Yes, I did; better try a new download.

@Danny M • 23 Apr, 2016 Is there a way to look at the video stream and see if it has hardcoded subs? I am not bothered about adding/removing just to see if they exist?

@anujsingh786 • 11 Jun, 2016 It can't be removed because it is saved as picture in the frame. Better to download another clean copy.

@anujsingh786 • 11 Jun, 2016 Hard coding becomes the part of an image in frame, it can not be removed. You can cut that much part of loose video quality, if you try. So look for another clean copy.

@Ankita Katdare • 28 Jun, 2016

Danny M

Is there a way to look at the video stream and see if it has hardcoded subs?

When you download video files, in most cases you can check a couple of screenshots or ask the uploaded if it has subs in comments. There's only those 2 ways of finding out if there are hardcoded subs in the file before downloading it.

@Govind Borgaonkar • 24 Aug, 2016 😀
Nice blog, I found good information here.
Thanks to all !

@Govind Borgaonkar • 25 Aug, 2016 If subtitles are not hard-coded, most of the times there is .srt file with the same name as video file, you won't see subtitles if filenames are different.


I just found a way to remove hard-coded subtitles, which I didn't like
they were saying to crop / trim video from bottom using a software

I think there is no other way.

@Moylius • 02 Jan, 2017 Hello, I need help in removing hardcoded subtitle!! I tried in many softwares but I don't know how to remove, so I have searched more and found this on google How To Remove Hardcoded Subtitles | ONLINE & EASY will it work? Looks useful.

@Ankita Katdare • 06 Aug, 2018

I am not sure if it works, but has anyone tried using MKVToolNix? Not sure if it works. As the name says it is only useful for .mkv files. So .mp4 may not work.

@Akhilesh Pandey • 20 Oct, 2018

@Ideal Does it crop the video?

@Ankita  Did you find any way to do it without cropping?

Thanks

@Tonya Rabish • 23 Oct, 2018

 use Avdshare Video Converter to Add or remove all kinds of subtitles, like SRT, SSA/ASS, and IDX/SUB to or from MKV, MP4, WMV, MOV, ASF, FLV, AVI, MPEG, etc.See the guide:https://www.avdshare.com/extract-subtitles-from-mkv