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Sometimes one runs into that weird (HDTV) video file with an obscure subtitle format which ffmpeg and ffprobe do not even see but your media player (I use IINA on my Mac) and Media Info do show these subtitle tracks marked as EIA-608 and/or EIA-708.
An example screenshot of Media Info:
So how do we extract this subtitle to an SRT file?
Seem ffmpeg can actually do something with this file. Extract the subtitle like so:
ffmpeg -f lavfi -i "movie='YourVideoFilename.mp4' [out+subcc]" -map 0:s:0 eia608_subs.srt
** Mind the double and single quotes ...
This will result in a proper SRT file (with a potentially formatting tags).
Note: -map 0:s:0 will select the first EIA-608 subtitle.
If there are multiple you can select the next one with -map 0:s:1, and the next one with -map 0:s:2, etc.
Note: Works with MKV files as well. 😊
