Did you try,
1. place mkv video file that has subtitles on the timeline
2. right-click on the file, select Extract Subtitles
3. The subtitles should be in the Subtitle Room.
Once you have extracted the subtitles from the file, you can then edit the subtitle text in the Subtitle Room as needed or write them out as a file.

Ok thanks that helps.

I tried that now and I see the extract option but it tells me there are no subtitle tracks in this mkv file. There definitely are, but they are probably VOBSUB subtitle tracks which is not a text format and maybe it doesn't support those?

For that you might try a subtitle editor with your file and see if that can extract them. Often one can then save as a srt file for use in PD.

Jeff

Thanks yes I will figure something out I just wanted to check I wasn't missing something obvious first. VOBSUB tracks as I understand it are effectively just a series of still images and timestamps. It means a DVD player doesn't need to support lots of languages, it just bitmasks the images in the subtitle track with the live video and it has no idea what it says.

so the options are either to convert that into a video stream that you can put on another track. Or more usefuly to subtitle text files but that would involve an OCR process because something has to read the images and and convert to text.

I'm not sure it will work, but have you looked at Subtitle Edit, I believe it could handle image based vobsub's and has built in OCR.

Jeff