How to Remove Subtitles from a Video
Erase burned-in subtitles and captions in 3 steps.
Upload Your Video
Drag & drop or select the video with burned-in subtitles, translated text, or caption overlays. Supports MP4, MOV, WebM and more.
Keep Automatic Mode On
Automatic mode scans the video and finds the subtitle lines by itself. Switch to Manual only if you want to keep some text or mark a line yourself.
Check the Preview, then Download
AI removes the subtitle text and rebuilds the background. Processing usually takes a few minutes; you can close the page and find the result under My videos.
Automatic Subtitle Detection
In Automatic mode, Wipe AI reads the video for text and removes every subtitle line it finds, from the first frame to the last, without you marking anything. It rebuilds only the pixels of the letters, so the picture around the subtitles stays as it was.
Use Manual mode when you want to keep some text, such as a title, or when a line is missed. Draw a box over the subtitles and set the seconds where they appear. Each box gets its own track on the timeline.
What Subtitles Can You Remove from Videos?
Wipe AI removes most kinds of burned-in subtitles and caption overlays, from movie subtitles to social media captions.
Burned In Movie Subtitles
Remove hardcoded subtitles that are baked into the video itself and cannot be switched off in the player.
Social Media Captions
Erase caption overlays from TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, and repurposed clips.
Translated Subtitle Tracks
Clean up translated subtitles, fan subs, and multilingual text that appears throughout the video.
Karaoke Lyrics
Remove karaoke lines, song lyrics, and animated caption text burned into music or sing along videos.
Lower Third Text
Erase presenter names, title bars, and lower third graphics that behave like subtitle overlays.
HD Output
Creator and Studio export up to 1080p, Starter up to 720p, never larger than your original.
Why Removing Burned-In Subtitles Is Hard
Subtitle removal is one of the most challenging video editing tasks. Burned in (hardcoded) subtitles are part of the video's pixel data they cannot simply be toggled off. The challenge is bigger than removing a static logo because subtitles:
- Change every few seconds: Each line is different, with different lengths, line breaks, and durations. Hundreds of unique text shapes per video.
- Sit on the lower third of the frame: Often overlapping with faces, hands, body movement, and important visual details.
- Have a "safe area" background: Subtitle creators often add a black or semi transparent box behind text for legibility, which has to be removed along with the text itself.
- Use varied fonts and colors: White with black outline is most common, but yellow, fancy fonts, and colored highlights all exist.
Wipe AI's auto-detect mode handles all of these because it identifies text regions on a frame by frame basis, then inpaints each region using surrounding context.
When Subtitles Can Be Removed Without AI
Before using AI inpainting, check whether your video has soft subtitles (a separate text track) instead of hardcoded ones. To check:
- Open the video in VLC Media Player.
- Click Subtitle → Subtitle Track.
- If you see options other than "Disable", they're soft. Select "Disable" the subtitles disappear instantly with no AI processing required.
- If subtitles remain visible after disabling all tracks, they're hardcoded.
Common sources of soft subtitles: Netflix downloads, official streaming releases, YouTube videos with captions enabled, MKV files with embedded SRT tracks. Common sources of hardcoded subtitles: foreign films, anime fansubs, social media reposts, TikTok auto captions, news broadcasts, and pirated/redistributed content where the original subtitle track was lost.
Removing Subtitles in Different Languages
Subtitles in English and other Latin-alphabet languages, and in Cyrillic, are detected for everyone. For Hindi, Arabic, Urdu, Chinese, Japanese and Korean, Wipe AI adds the matching text model based on your browser language, so set your browser to that language if most of your videos use it.
- Latin scripts: English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian, Turkish, Polish, Dutch, Romanian.
- Cyrillic: Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Serbian.
- Devanagari: Hindi, Marathi, Nepali.
- Arabic script: Arabic, Urdu, Persian.
- CJK: Chinese, Japanese, Korean. Dense characters can leave faint outlines.
If a line is missed, switch to Manual mode and draw a box over it.
Karaoke Lyrics and Animated Subtitle Removal
Karaoke style subtitles where each word lights up as it's sung, often with bouncing cursors and color animations are technically the same as regular hardcoded subtitles to the AI. The animation doesn't change the pixel removal task; the AI processes each frame independently regardless of whether the text is animating.
That said, karaoke text is usually centered low in the frame and stays for the entire song, which means a lot of the video has to be inpainted. Processing time scales with the area covered: a 3 minute karaoke video might take 4 to 6 minutes to clean.
Subtitle Removal vs Translation Workflow
Some users want to remove existing subtitles in one language and add their own subtitles in another language. The recommended workflow:
- Strip the original subtitles with Wipe AI's auto-detect mode.
- Run the cleaned video through speech to text (Whisper, Google Speech, or any captioning tool) to generate fresh subtitles in your target language.
- Burn the new subtitles in using FFmpeg, HandBrake, or any video editor.
This produces a clean, translated video without traces of the original subtitles.
Common Subtitle Removal Mistakes
- Cropping the bottom third: Removes subtitles but also cuts off important video content. Not viable for vertical TikTok style videos.
- Black bar masking: Hides subtitles behind a black rectangle. Looks worse than the original subtitles. Not a real solution.
- Manual frame by frame editing: Theoretically possible in DaVinci Resolve or After Effects, but takes hours per minute of video. Not practical at any scale.
- Re-encoding without removing: Some users hope re-encoding will "wipe" subtitles. It will not re-encoding preserves whatever pixels are in the source.
For broader text removal beyond just subtitles, see remove text from video. For platform specific watermarks, see TikTok Watermark Remover, CapCut Watermark Remover, and Kinemaster tools.
Subtitles in MP4, MOV, AVI and MKV Files
MP4, MOV and WebM files upload directly. AVI and MKV files work when your browser can play them; if the preview stays black, convert the file to MP4 first.
MKV files often carry subtitles as a separate track. Turn subtitles off in your player before you upload: if the text disappears, it is a soft subtitle track and you can simply drop that track, no AI needed. If the text stays on screen, it is burned into the picture and Wipe AI can remove it.
The result is always an H.264 MP4 with the first audio track kept. Extra audio tracks and subtitle tracks from an MKV are not carried over, so keep your original file if you need them.
Burned-In Captions, Auto Captions and Bilingual Subtitles
Captions that TikTok, CapCut, Instagram or YouTube generate automatically become part of the picture once the video is exported. Automatic mode finds them the same way it finds regular subtitles, including word-by-word captions that change every second.
Bilingual subtitles put two lines on screen, often in two different scripts. Automatic mode detects both lines. In Manual mode, draw one box per line and limit each box to the seconds where that line is visible instead of one tall box over the whole video: the smaller the area, the cleaner the rebuilt background.