Remove Subtitles from Video File using FFmpeg

FFmpeg provides tools for handling audio, video, and subtitle streams. When a video container contains embedded subtitles, those subtitle tracks can be excluded while creating a new video file. This is useful when a subtitle-free copy is required without modifying the original media streams through re-encoding. This tutorial shows how to remove subtitles from video file using FFmpeg.

A subtitle track can be removed by selecting all streams except subtitle streams and copying the remaining streams directly into a new container. This method preserves the existing video and audio data without re-encoding.

For testing, a sample video containing an embedded subtitle track can be downloaded with:

curl -sSo test.mp4 https://raw.githubusercontent.com/chromium/chromium/main/media/test/data/bear-1280x720-avt_subt_frag.mp4

The following command creates a new video without subtitle streams:

ffmpeg -v error -i test.mp4 -map 0 -map -0:s -c copy result.mp4

Command breakdown:

• ffmpeg - the command used to process multimedia files.
• -v error - restricts FFmpeg output to error messages while suppressing informational and other non-error messages.
• -i test.mp4 - specifies the video file used as the input.
• -map 0 - includes all streams from the input file.
• -map -0:s - removes subtitle streams from the selected stream set.
• -c copy - copies the selected streams without re-encoding.
• result.mp4 - specifies the output file that contains the video and audio streams without embedded subtitles.