FFmpeg Subtitle Tools

n8.1-pgs5.0 Convert subtitles between any format. SRT to Blu-ray PGS, PGS to SRT via OCR, styled subtitles with full animation — one command, no format barriers.

"Subtitle encoding currently only possible from text to text or bitmap to bitmap"

That bug is FFmpeg #3819, open since 2014. These builds fix it — ready-to-use binaries, no dependencies, drop-in replacement for your existing FFmpeg. Adds a PGS encoder (#6843), 88 format conversions that weren't possible before, and direct RGBA-to-GIF encoding.

Animation

Subtitle fade effect converted from styled text to Blu-ray PGS bitmap format

Fades, colour changes, and movement in styled subtitles (ASS/SSA) are preserved when converting to Blu-ray PGS. The encoder detects animation automatically — no manual tagging, no frame-by-frame export. Overlapping subtitles with different timings are handled correctly.

Usage

# SRT/ASS/WebVTT to Blu-ray PGS
ffmpeg -i subtitles.srt -s 1920x1080 output.sup
ffmpeg -i input.mkv -c:s pgssub -c:v copy -c:a copy output.mkv

# PGS/DVD/DVB bitmap to SRT via OCR
ffmpeg -i input.mkv -c:s srt output.srt

# RGBA to GIF without filter pipeline
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -c:v gif out.gif

Set the output format, FFmpeg handles the rest. Text to bitmap, bitmap to text, 114 OCR languages supported.

Download

Ready-to-use binaries built on FFmpeg 8.1. Download, extract, run. LGPL 2.1.

Linux x86_64glibc 2.17+
Linux arm64glibc 2.17+
macOS x86_6410.14+
macOS arm6411+ (Apple Silicon)
Windows x86_64Windows 10+
Windows arm64Windows 11+

Each target has two variants: minimal (ffmpeg + ffprobe) and -eng (adds English OCR data). Other languages: download .traineddata from the tessdata release into a tessdata/ directory next to the binary.

Links

Releases Development Tests Quantizers OCR languages Colour distance