Extracting a SRT file from a MKV container

If you are an avid serie/movies watcher like me, this might be a usefull one-liner. I always have the problem that my Plex setup does not ‘understand’ baked-in subtitles, resulting in whacky subtitles and subtitles being out of sync.

I found out out that its really easy to extract the subtitle’s .srt file using a Windows cli tool called MKVToolNix. You can find MKVToolNix here The following command will provide you information about the target .mkv file:

mkvinfo.exe <filename>

This will give an overview of all ‘tracks’ in the .mkv container. Don’t forget which track ID contains the subtitle!

Next, we will use the track ID to extract the subtitle from the .mkv movie using the following command:

mkvextract.exe tracks <your_mkv_video><track_numer>:<subtitle_file.srt>

This should save your .srt file in the location you provided!