Remove SDH (Hearing-Impaired Text) From SRT

How to use the Remove SDH from SRT

1. Drop your SDH or closed-caption subtitle file. The recommended options are already ticked.
2. Review the checked options: [Bracketed], (Parenthesised) sound descriptions, music lines and SPEAKER NAME: labels.
3. Click Clean subtitles. The status line shows how many cues were changed and how many disappeared because they only contained sound descriptions.
4. Download the cleaned file and load it next to your video.

What SDH subtitles contain

SDH (subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing) and closed captions include text that regular subtitles omit:

• Sound effects in brackets: [door creaks], [phone ringing]
• Speech descriptions in parentheses: (whispering), (in Spanish)
• Music notes: ♪ upbeat music ♪
• Speaker labels in capital letters: NARRATOR:, MAN ON TV:

Viewers who can hear the audio often find these distracting, especially in foreign-language films where the rest of the text is dialogue only.

What happens to cues that only contain descriptions

If a cue consists only of a sound effect, it becomes empty after cleaning and is removed. The timing of the other cues stays unchanged, so the subtitles still match the video. A line like [laughs] That is funny. keeps only “That is funny.”

Things to double-check

• Lyrics inside music notes are kept if the line has words but removed if it only contains notes — check the preview if you want to keep song lyrics.
• Translations or foreign-language lines marked with brackets (for example [in French] Bonjour) lose their label; the text stays.
• Speaker labels in mixed case, like Anna:, are not removed automatically to avoid false positives in normal dialogue.

Related changes

Need more than SDH removal? The full SRT cleaner can also strip formatting tags, remove ad lines and merge duplicated cues. To turn the result into a transcript, use SRT to TXT.

When you should keep SDH

Sound descriptions are essential for deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers and are often required for accessibility compliance. Remove them only for personal use or for a specific audience that can hear the audio, and keep the original SDH file as a separate version. If you publish videos yourself, offering both a captions track (with descriptions) and a subtitles track (dialogue only) is the most inclusive approach.

In HTML5 video this maps to kind="captions" for the SDH version and kind="subtitles" for the cleaned one; see the WebVTT track guide.

Frequently asked questions