Utility to extract only CC text and create SRT?

[kogyaru]

Well, at first I thought it was weird that there was no video passthrough in HB, so I could just extract the CC text from a given title and have a very small .mp4 file containing just the timed-text track -- which I could then convert to SRT later using mp4box, saving me oodles of time vs. re-encoding -- but jbrjake, in a Ponies reply in December, makes the case that such a feature would cause unwanted scope creep.

I'll concur with that, but I'm still searching for such a utility. Know of any program on any platform that will extract the CC text, per title? I played with X on Windows that does extract the CC stream to SRT, but writes everything to one file, including time offset. This causes problems for, say, compilation DVDs of music or animation shorts, of which I have many. The second and following titles have to have its relevant CC track's time offset reset to the beginning, which can be a real timesink if the first line of dialogue doesn't start within the first second of the title track.

If no such beast exists (per-title CC-to-SRT extraction), I'd love it if someone could write a standalone batch util to do this...

[Bantha]

I use SubRip to do what you are wanting to do.

http://www.videohelp.com/tools/Subrip

[Deleted User 11865]

I use SubRip to do what you are wanting to do.

http://www.videohelp.com/tools/Subrip

Can Subrip extract actual closed captions? I thought it only did VOBSUB.

kogyaru, the only tool that I can think of is CCExtractor: http://ccextractor.sourceforge.net/ - nto sure whether it does what you want or not.

[Bantha]

Sorry, I just assumed that Subrip would work because everytime I load a movie in it, it tells me it detected Closed Captions. Sorry. That CCextractor program looks promising though.

[kogyaru]

kogyaru, the only tool that I can think of is CCExtractor: http://ccextractor.sourceforge.net/ - nto sure whether it does what you want or not.

Thanks for the pointer. Using a Mac binary, this tool wasn't able to read from a DVD device or understand what to do with files inside a VIDEO_TS folder. I think the developers of CCExtractor intended to work mainly with captured stream files, not DVD titles (much less VOBs). Oh well.

[Deleted User 11865]

This just crossed my mind - in HB, create a 64x64 video file (FFmpeg MPEG-4 or x264 ultrafast settings), no audio, and CC passthrough to MKV (for MP4 HB creates tx3g, not SRT). Then try something like mkvextract (part of Mkvtoolnix).

It's cumbersome but may work.