Remove embedded subtitles from an .mkv file?

Use MkvToolNix. The mkvmerge tool can do exactly what you want. It's a very capable Matroska manipulator and should be able to remove any kind of stream from an MKV without recoding all the other streams.

On Windows, download the latest version from here. Just run the installer.
On Linux, you can find the package mkvtoolnix in your repository, or alternatively download them from the homepage.
On OS X, the easiest way would be to install mkvtoolnix through Homebrew.

I think one of these commands will do what you want:

# assume input.mkv has 3 subtitle tracks
# remove subtitle track 2 (copy 1&3) from input.mkv & save to output.mkv
mkvmerge -o output.mkv --subtitle-tracks 1,3 input.mkv

# remove all subtitles (copy none)
mkvmerge -o output.mkv --no-subtitles input.mkv

quack quixote

Posted 2010-01-20T17:28:10.483

Reputation: 37 382

4Usage note: The track numbers supplied to --stracks are not 1 (first subtitle), 2 (second), 3 (third), etc. Use mkvinfo input.mkv to enumerate the tracks in the .mkv first (e.g. track 0 may be video; 1,2,3 may be audio; 4,5,6 may be subtitles) then use the 0-based track number with the --stracks switch. In quack's example above this might be --stracks 4,6 – AlwaysLearning – 2015-01-04T11:01:48.707

To confirm, does the GUI version of the program also remove subtitles without re-encoding? – Hashim – 2018-09-03T03:27:32.137

I have found the output files from MkvToolNix (mkvmerge) to be unusable by some players & converter (ArcSoft VideoConverter in particular - I was trying to strip the subtitles prior to converting them for viewing on my iPhone). – jeffreypriebe – 2013-03-04T02:48:17.580

Remove embedded subtitles from an .mkv file?

Answers