Getting Subtitles Off a Video: Delete Tracks vs Burned-In
Subtitles that refuse to go away: first identify what they are — a data track you can unload, or pixels already fused into the picture. The first removes with one command; the second only with physical means.
Step one: soft or hard?
Soft subtitles are an independent data track (SRT/ASS text carried inside the container), rendered by the player on top of the picture. A codec inspection that shows a subtitle stream settles it. Tells: any player can toggle them on/off, text renders razor-sharp, size never distorts with scaling.
Hard subtitles are pixels baked in during mastering, fused with the picture: no subtitle stream in the inspection, no player can turn them off. Downloaded encodes and platform-transcoded videos are usually hard-subbed.
Soft subtitles: strip the track, lossless in seconds
Removing a soft track is taking one stream out of the container: convert to MP4 without carrying the subtitle track while the video and audio streams copy verbatim — seconds fast, zero quality loss. Note that ASS effects subtitles common in MKV cannot convert to MP4’s embedded subtitle format anyway; stripping them is behavior, not a defect.
To keep the text for later: export the subtitle track as a standalone SRT first, then strip. That leaves "clean picture, subtitles in hand" — and you can always attach them back.
Hard subtitles: crop or cover, nothing else
Hard subtitles are part of the picture, so "removal" is physical: bottom-positioned subtitles yield to cropping — cut away the lower strip containing them, workable when the subtitle band is narrow and the subject sits in the upper frame. Text mid-frame or over faces cannot be cropped without harming the subject — that leaves covering: mosaic or an overlay block pressed over the region.
Both paths cost something: cropping loses picture content (a recomposition, effectively), covering leaves visible processing. Set expectations accordingly — the ceiling for hard-subbed material is "not distracting", not "gone". When a clean source exists, sourcing it beats every extraction trick.