Extracting QuickTime mov_text subtitles with ffmpeg

I have a .mov file that has mov_text-formatted subtitle tracks that were created using the old (now deprecated) QuickTime 7 Pro's "Text Track" feature. This is what ffmpeg -i myfile.mov tells me about them:

 Stream #0:4(eng): Subtitle: mov_text (text / 0x74786574), 640x116, 0 kb/s (default) Metadata: rotate : 0 creation_time : 2021-11-20T03:08:45.000000Z handler_name : Apple Text Media Handler

Currently I still have access to QuickTime 7 Pro, where I can extract the subtitles to then convert to SubRip or some other format that can be read by other programs. However, I need to update my system and QuickTime 7 Pro doesn't run on macOS Catalina and above, so I am looking for a way to be able to still access those subtitles on newer systems. It seems ffmpeg is the way to go but I'm still stuck.

Here's what I've tried:

ffmpeg -i test.mov -map 0:s:0 -c copy -f data QT-subtitles.txt

gives me the plain text of the subtitles but without timestamps, so it's pretty useless for converting the subtitles to a different format.

ffmpeg -i test.mov -map 0:s:0 QT-subtitles.srt

correctly converts the subtitles to SubRip including timestamps. But it gets rid of line breaks and other formatting.
It also gives me the following error messages of invalid data found:

Stream mapping: Stream #0:4 -> #0:0 (mov_text (native) -> subrip (srt))
Press [q] to stop, [?] for help
[mov_text @ 0x7fa492823200] invalid UTF-8 byte in subtitle
[mov_text @ 0x7fa492823200] Invalid UTF-8 in decoded subtitles text; maybe missing -sub_charenc option
Error while decoding stream #0:4: Invalid data found when processing input
[mov_text @ 0x7fa492823200] invalid UTF-8 byte in subtitle
[mov_text @ 0x7fa492823200] Invalid UTF-8 in decoded subtitles text; maybe missing -sub_charenc option
Error while decoding stream #0:4: Invalid data found when processing input
size= 6kB time=00:02:04.30 bitrate= 0.4kbits/s speed=3.32e+04x
video:0kB audio:0kB subtitle:3kB other streams:0kB global headers:0kB muxing overhead: 82.697044%

Suggestions from the comments below to specify -c text or -sub_charenc all give me the same results.

So, I'm hoping to find a way to extract the subtitle to a simple text file that is either still QTText-formatted (see below), or in some other way preserves linebreaks and other formatting. This is how the original QuickTime Text Track looks as text file when I extract and export it through QuickTime 7 Pro (see specs here).

{QTtext}{font:Verdana}{plain}{size:36}{textColor: 65535, 65535, 65535}{backColor: 0, 0, 0}{justify:default}{timeScale:30}{width:640}{height:116}{timeStamps:absolute}{language:0}{textEncoding:0}
[00:00:00.00]
Text here {bold} bold word {plain} text here
[00:00:01.12]
Text here text here text here Next line here (respects spaces)
[00:00:02.14]

I could then simply write a script to convert the formatting tags such as {bold} etc. to html tags, which, I believe SubRip understands.

Is there a way to specify the output format through ffmpeg other than having it guess what I need from the file extension such as srt or txt? (I'm thinking in particular that if I was able to specify mov_text as output it might give me a QTText-formatted file like the one above ... but how would I do that?)

If ffmpeg can't do the job I'd be happy to try any other tools.

13 Sorted by: Reset to default

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