What is video-subtitle-remover?

Video Subtitle Remover (VSR) is a Python tool that uses AI to remove burned-in subtitles and text watermarks from videos and images. Burned-in subtitles (sometimes called hardcoded subtitles) are text overlaid directly onto the video frames, as opposed to subtitle tracks that can be toggled on and off. This tool detects where the text appears and fills in the background behind it using AI image reconstruction techniques, so the output looks like the text was never there. The tool runs entirely on your own machine with no third-party API required. It offers both a graphical interface and a command-line version. You can remove subtitles from an entire video automatically, specify exact screen coordinates to target only a particular area (such as the bottom strip where subtitles typically appear), or batch-process multiple images to remove watermarks. The README (written in Chinese) describes three AI-based fill methods with different trade-offs. The STTN mode works best on footage of real people and is the fastest option. The LAMA mode produces better results on still images and animated content. The ProPainter mode is the slowest but handles videos with a lot of fast movement more accurately. The tool supports NVIDIA GPU acceleration via CUDA, AMD and Intel GPU acceleration via DirectML on Windows, Apple Silicon on macOS, and CPU-only mode for systems without a compatible GPU. Pre-built packages for Windows are available as downloads for each GPU configuration. Docker images are also provided for each environment. Setup requires Python 3.11 or newer, and the installation steps differ depending on whether you have an NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, or no GPU. The README provides separate installation instructions for each path. The project is open source under the Apache 2.0 license, which allows free use in personal and commercial projects.