ccextractor is a fast closed captions extractor for MPEG and H264 files. Supports DVD, HDTV transport streams, Replay TV. Use this to create .srt (subtitles) files for your TV captures, have transcripts so you can edit subtitles, etc. Rips closed captions in raw format from DVD and DVB/ATSC MPG files.

What kind of closed captions does CCExtractor support?
For now, American TV captions. It will not work with European or Australian subtitles, the standard is just different. While CCExtractor's maintainer would like to add support for these as well, that's a very large project unlikely to happen on personal time (meaning if you are a company that needs this you can contract me to develop it).

In short ccextractor is a small program that processes MPEG 2 files and extracts closed captions data to generate subtitle files.
You can use this program to create .srt (subtitles) files for your TV captures, have transcripts so you can edit subtitles, etc.
You can pass as many input files as you need. They will be processed in order.
Output will be one single file (either raw or srt). Use this if you made your
recording in several cuts (to skip commercials for example) but you want one
subtitle file with contiguous timing.
Whats the point of generating separate files for subtitles, if they are already in the source file?

There are several reasons to have subtitles separated from the video file, including:
1. Closed captions never survive MPEG processing. If you take a MPEG file and encode it to any format (such as divx), your result file will not have closed captions. This means that if you want to keep the subtitles, you need to keep the original file. This is hardly practical if you are archiving HDTV shows for example.
2. Subtitles files are small - so small (around 250 Kb for a movie) that you can quickly download them, or email them, etc, in case you have a recording without subtitles.
3. Subtitles files are indexable: You can have a database with all your subtitles if you want (there are many available), so you can search the dialogs.
4. Subtitles files are a de-facto standard: Almost every player can use them. In fact, many setbox players accept subtitles files in .srt format - so you can have subtitles in your divx movies and not just in your original DVDs.
5. Closed captions are stored in many different formats by capture cards. Upgrading to a new card, if it comes with a new player, may mean that you cant use your previously recorded closed captions, even if the audio/video are fine.
6. Closed captions require a closed caption decoder. All US TV have one (its a legal requirement), but no European TV does, since there are not closed captions in Europe (teletext is used instead). Basically this means that if you buy a DVD in the US which has closed captions but no DVD subtitles, you are out of luck. This is a problem with many (most) old TV shows DVDs, which only come with closed captions. DVD producers dont bother doing DVD subs, since its another way to segment the market, same as with DVD regions.

While both provide the user with the same thing (i.e. a transcript of the audio synchronized to it) there are very different from a technical point of view:
1. DVD subtitles are image based (they could be anything, not just text) while Closed Captions are text based (they can only be text).
2. DVD subtitles are decoded by the DVD player, while Closed Captions are decoded by the TV. This is an important difference because if you are in Europe and buy a DVD from the US that has closed captions but no DVD subtitles you will not be able to use the captions as the TVs in Europe don't have a Closed Caption decoder.

The license of this software is Free, you can free download and free use this video utility software.