CCExtractor is an open source, portable, fast and completely free command-line software that can be used by anyone to effortlessly extract closed caption streams from MPEG and H264 video files.

In other words, the CCExtractor software lets you rip the raw closed caption (read: subtitles) data from a number of video type sources, such as DVD-Video, replay TV, most HDTV captures that lets you save the Transport Stream, bttv files, DVR-MS, Tivo files, and Dish Network files.

The program comes with a wide range of command-line options. To view them, as well as to view the usage message (helps you understand how to add the options and use the software to extract closed captions), run the ‘ccextractor’ or ‘ccextractor --help’ command in a Terminal app. The commands are organized in categories, such as network support, input formats, output formats, teletext, transcript, etc.

To install and use the CCExtractor software on your GNU/Linux operating system, you will have to first download the latest release from either Softpedia or the project’s website, save the archive somewhere on your computer (preferably your Home folder), and unpack it.

Open a Terminal app and navigate to the “src” folder inside the extracted directory (e.g. cd /home/softpedia/ccextractor.0.75/src). Run the ‘cmake .’ command to configure the program, followed by the ‘make’ command to compile it.

Finally, after a successful compilation process, install CCExtractor with the ‘sudo make install’ command. Use the program directly from the shell prompt by running the ‘ccextractor’ command (see the section above for available command-line options).

At the moment, it supports American TV captions (CEA-608 and CEA-708), as well as Teletext based European subtitles. CCExtractor is a cross-platform software that supports Linux, Apple Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows operating systems.