Downloading Soft Coded Subs

[Moonee]

Anyone know if there's a free software or something out there that downloads Soft Coded subs from a video player?

Sometimes I find a movie that's not in English and it has soft-coded Subs (Not hard-coded) and when I download the movie, there's no subs available

So I was wondering if there's some type of tool that could also download the soft-coded subs

[DreamScape]

I'm not sure I understand the question. Sometimes you download a video with soft-coded subtitles but there are no subtitles when playing the video?

Sometimes I see confusion caused when a video contains "forced" subtitles, that is subtitles that are only for the foreign sections of the film. So people might use the track bar to find a random scene and when they don't see any subtitles they think they are not working when in fact the forced subtitles only cover a very small amount of the film.

There are other times when the subtitle is indeed empty with nothing there. Or a subtitle track that only contains occasionally advertisement for the site the movie was downloaded from (yuck)


If you are asking about extracting soft-coded subtitles from a film, the easiest way is to simply drag and drop the movie into Subtitle Edit, which is a very useful subtitle editor with dozens of uses.

https://www.nikse.dk/subtitleedit

There are other free programs. I use an extractor built on top of mkvtoolnix which is a bit more temperamental.


I typically see "soft-coded" to describe subtitles embedded in the movie container that can be turned on or off from the media player. So, if you downloaded the movie file you already downloaded the subtitles... By contrast, external subtitles would be a separate file that you might need to grab from FLM attachment or a resource site like opensubtitles.

[Moonee]

Basically what I was saying is..

When I download a video that has soft-coded subs available.. The subs don't download with the video so when i play the video in a media player, there's no subs

So I was wondering if there's a tool for downloading soft-coded subs

Apologies if my OP was a little confusing to understand

[Night457]

I think maybe I am more confused by the question than DreamScape. Everything he said about SubitleEdit is correct.

What kind of downloads are you talking about? Streaming videos, maybe?

If a subtitle is not part of a downloaded video MKV, then it has to be downloaded separately. If you download a video from YouTube or Vimeo or ARTE that has ON/OFF subtitles, those subtitles can generally be downloaded with JDownloader2 or yt-dlp. I don't think Video DownloadHelper gets them but I am not sure because I am not sure I have used it to download videos that even HAVE subtitles. If you give a specific example for what you mean (link for a video with subtitles, preferably NOT georestricted to keep it simple!) I might be able to demonstrate with pictures. But not tonight (opposite sides of the globe for us!)

You mentioned that you tried yt-dlp but found it difficult to understand, and I get that. But it is very useful. The trick is getting the right files in the right folder so it is set up right. Then it is just typing commands in the same format almost every single time. It is true that GUIs are easier because they do not require text commands. There is a GUI version of yt-dlp but I have not used it so I don't know how well it works.

[Moonee]

So, if you downloaded the movie file you already downloaded the subtitles...

No? I downloaded a movie from Tubi that has soft-coded subs (As shown in the screenshot)

[Image]

Played the movie in VLC and there was no subtitle track

And there was no srt file to be seen

[Moonee]

wait, wrong screenshot

[DreamScape]

Okay, yeah... I should have guessed that was what you were talking about. Like Night said you can use JD2 or yt-dlp, among countless other programs. JD2 sometimes has a plugin option you need to find in order to include subtitles. It's kinda annoying but you only need to enable it once (per plugin). With yt-dlp you can use --all-subs to download every subtitle available, or you can use one of the other options to choose the language you want.

You can often get the subtitle easily without any program by opening devtools in your browser and finding the subtitle (usually a VTT file) in the network tab. Although this might be a bit advanced for today

[Moonee]

I don't use yt-dlp

That tool looks too advanced for me
I tried it and i didn't know how to use it

I'll try jdownloader2 though

[Night457]

I'm afraid I don't find JD2 much use for downloading Tubi videos, but it looks like it could be useful for Tubi subtitles. I plugged in a link for a single video (not a series) that was NOT DRM protected. It gave a total of 45 video files with numbers for filenames so there was no way to tell which was which. However it gave only one SRT subtitle result, which was the correct one for the video I plugged in.

And I hate to say it but yt-dlp downloaded both the correct video and the correct subtitle file.

JD2 generally works for both video and subtitles from YouTube, but lately I think not for Vimeo. It gives me a "Plugin Defect" error that I have not been able to fix. Perhaps they have it figured out at TNT. Rather than put in the effort fighting it, I use yt-dlp.

It's frustrating to have to use different downloaders for different sites. If someone uses a Premium downloader then they don't have to switch around so much. But I won't pay for software.

[Moonee]

I'm the same

I won't pay for software either that you could just get for free