Easiest way to mass convert VOBSUB to SRT without extract/remux?

[Chrushev]

I have a ton of old cartoons (100+) all have VOBSUB as subtitles. Id like to convert them to SRT either as a separate file or embedded back into the MKV. Is there a program that can do this for me automatically?

I know I can use mkvmergeGUI to extract VobSUB then convert it and remux with mkvmergeGUI again. But to do that 100+ times would be very tedious. Im willing to do it, but want to see if there is an easier way first?

[sneaker]

I wanted to suggest Subtitle Edit. But it seems it is currently broken with mkv/sub input both in cli and GUI batch mode (Tools->Batch convert). I will ask the author, maybe he can fix it quickly.

Are the subtitles always the same track number? Because then you could write a batch with first extracting, then converting and if wanted embedding:

for %%a in (*.mkv) do (
mkvextract tracks "%%~a" "2:%%~na.idx"
subtitleedit /convert "%%~na.sub" subrip
mkvmerge -o "outputfolder\%%~a" "%%~a" "%%~na.srt"
del %%~na.sub
del %%~na.idx
del %%~na.srt
)

Note that batch converting vobsub to srt is error prone because the OCR process isn't perfect. It is better to do this one file at a time and manually correct any errors.



BTW: ffmpeg has Tesseract OCR engine. I wonder if it's possible to this with just ffmpeg in a single step.

[JVRaines]

FFmpeg's OCR filter produces a frame-level data file. It has to be processed into SRT or some other subtitle format.

[ghkdfkd]

Recently, there are ways to convert SUB IDX files online into SRTs.
https://convert.jamack.net/en/ OR Use Subtitle Edit