How to use MKVToolNix to extract SRT subtitle form MKV file

General Discussions
15

MKVToolNix works fine with its GUI but also in the terminal on macOS. The raw apps are just hidden in the app itself. To access them…

  • Right click the MKVToolNix in /Applications and click Show Package Contents
  • from there goto ./Contents/MacOS or ./Contents/Resources to find the MKVToolNix binaries (sorry… I cannot check the exact path right now)
  • Open the app Terminal
  • Drag the binary mkvextract into the terminal window… this will copy the full path into terminal (don’t worry, it won’t move the actual file)
  • Follow the MKVToolNix documentation to complete the command to extract your SRT

If you don’t want to do this without a GUI I can also recommend to use an app called Subler. Opening the MKV with Subler will result in Subler creating a new media file, allowing you to chose which tracks to transfer from the MKV (don’t worry if it doesn’t allow you to transfer the movie track… all you need is the subtitle). After confirming, you can extract the subtitle from the „new file“ and exit the app.
This also works great if you have image based DVD/Blu-Ray subtitles. Subler will apply OCR to convert those into SRTs.

Extract subtitles from a video (mkv) file with a script