videostreamffmpegvideo-encodingsubtitle

How to disable subtitles decoding in ffmpeg


I'm trying to convert some video file containing video, audio and subtitles streams into another format using FFMpeg. However, ffmpeg complains about the subtitles format - it cannot decode the stream. Since I don't need this subtitles stream, I'd like to know how can I disable subtitles stream decoding during conversion?


Solution

  • I've finally found an answer.

    There is such option as -sn which disables subtitles decoding from input stream. Also there are analogous options for audio and video decoding: -an and -vn respectively.

    It also turned out that there is another way to achieve this. One may use the -map option to select which streams are to be decoded. So omitting the subtitles stream among the -map options does the job.

    For example, if one has a movie file with 3 streams:

    the converting command for FFmpeg may look as follows:

    ffmpeg -i <input file> -sn -vcodec <video codec> -acodec <audio codec>  <output file>
    

    or

    ffmpeg -i <input file> -vcodec <video codec> -acodec <audio codec> -map 0:0 -map 0:1  <output file>
    

    The former command line deselects the subtitles stream (probably all of them, if there are several) while the latter one selects only the necessary streams to decode.