How to Extract Hardcoded Subtitles from Videos (macOS)
Problem: "Hardcoded" subtitles are baked into the video image itself, so there's no track to pull out. The only way to get the text back is to read it off the frames with OCR. GeekLink allows you to extract hardcoded subtitles from any…
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“Problem:
"Hardcoded" subtitles are baked into the video image itself, so there's no track to pull out. The only way to get the text back is to read it off the frames with OCR. GeekLink allows you to extract hardcoded subtitles from any…”Problem:
"Hardcoded" subtitles are baked into the video image itself, so there's no track to pull out. The only way to get the text back is to read it off the frames with OCR. GeekLink allows you to extract hardcoded subtitles from any video (GeekLink also does speech-to-text, AI translation, and burning subtitles back into video), and we have recently made a series of optimizations to extract subtitles from videos more accurately. It supports over a dozen languages, currently runs only on macOS, and has been speed-optimized.
Comparison:
There are a few of those tools (like VideOCR) on GitHub, but they cannot run on macOS and they are not as accurate as GeekLink.
Pricing:
12.99$/month; 99$/year;169$ Lifetime
We have now reached the stable version. You can find this app through this link: https://geeklink.dev/video-ocr
Comment with your usage scenario and receive 3 months of Pro membership as a gift!
I'm Flora, the founder of GeekLink. Here is my LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/flora-wang-9a028a407/
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Nice! you mentioned optimizing accuracy recently: how does it handle subtitles with backgrounds or busy footage where contrast is low? And does the "AI Re-segment" feature help fix OCR line-breaks that don't match natural sentence boundaries, or is that more for timing adjustments?
Isnt rapidvideoocr can be run with python commands on mac for this
oh man, i can't think of any reason to build this? why don't you download original video?
Curious if you did market research before building this? The market seems to keep shrinking as less and less videos have hardcoded subs. More people stream now anyway. Still looks cool though and handy
For the first question, our algorithm can detect the subtitle area, so the interference of noise is reduced. AI Re-segmentation is used on speech-to-text side(not OCR), and whisper always break subtitles in unnatural positions. You can find the article here.
Streaming platforms now rely on toggleable subtitles, but burned-in subtitles occur on fansubs, Chinese and Korean variety shows, and TV dramas. There are also a lot of old videos in the world. I did a lot of subtitle extraction for people, a common requirement is to extract subtitles from a video which created 10 years ago. In addition, short-form social videos (TikTok, Reels, Shorts) burn captions into the frame and that category is growing.
I took a quick look at this tool and it doesn't seem to have done enough acceleration for Apple Silicon.
For my personal use case, I want to extract the subtitles from videos to take notes, as it is more convenient to review the content of courses. Organizing the data and sending it to AI as a knowledge base is also quite useful. I have other clients who want to extract the subtitles from fan variety shows(may be for translating), and I also have clients who want to extract subtitles from video for data mining.
Then i wish you best of luck. There's always a niche out there for every product. Just have to find it
Thank you!