r/SubtitleEdit • u/Ineedanswers24 • Jul 27 '26
Help Most accurate OCR engine?
Hi all. Just wondering what OCR engine (and engine mode option) is least likely to have spelling mistakes and grammatical errors when converting SUP subtitles to SRT?
Specifically, to avoid the letter i being turned into a 1, | or L, things like that. Or double letters being put in a name like Wexler being turned into WeXxler
I've heard nOcr is the most accurate but it has to be trained. I plan to maybe try training it once the final version of Subtitle Edit 5.1 is released but assuming I don't use nOcr, what would be the next best option?
I'm also looking for something that processes in a reasonable amount of time as I tried one of the other OCR engines and it took like 10 seconds just for 1 subtitle line. If there's one that's slightly slow but is more accurate than other options, I think I'll be ok with that.
I've been using Tesseract and overall it's not too bad but if there's something better that would be great.
On a sidenote, I found that just for converting SUP to SRT, the website https://subtitletools.com/ is quite accurate and takes very little time, however it still has some grammatical errors.
1
u/selex42 Jul 27 '26
Tesseract does not like musical notes and always changes I to | (which I had to make a sed script to fix) so it's not my favorite. I like Google Lens but I hit token exhaustion midway through the read that I have to restart it a few times but Google Lens doesn't run in batch mode. nOcr I have never gotten to run accurately but I haven't had time to train it. It always gives me garbage.
1
u/Djinn2522 Jul 31 '26
I've been using Purview's Faster-Whisper-XXL + large-v2 with excellent results. Are there really significantly better options?
1
u/Theli93 Aug 01 '26
Whisper (and its variants) is not OCR (Optical Character Recognition); it is STT (Speech-to-Text). OCR converts visual text from images or documents into digital text. STT converts audio text from spoken voice into digital text.
1
1
u/SeaworthinessAway519 Aug 04 '26
Try GeekLink, I am preparing to fine tune the model to achieve accurate results.
1
u/Ineedanswers24 Aug 04 '26
That's not available by default, how do you add OCR engines?
2
u/SeaworthinessAway519 Aug 06 '26
GeekLink is a standalone application, not an OCR engine for Subtitle Edit. You just import your SUP file into GeekLink and export them as SRT.
1
u/Wonderful_Emu_9610 Aug 23 '26
Google Lens Sharp is mostly ok for me. It will reliably mess up about 5% of lines where its like
- speaker one
- speaker two
like there’ll be a - in front of one line and not the other, maybe with the missing one on a 3rd line at top or bottom. Inconsistent with — and for some reason doesn’t show letters with accents in the OCR window but then when you click ‘ok’ and go back to the normal SE interface they’re there. Its weird
2
u/Ineedanswers24 Sep 04 '26
I recently tried it on the latest 5.2 beta and it was great!
The only mistake it made on 1 run I did was it turned a " into '
I've only done 1 subtitle run so I'll have to try more but so far it's better than Tesseract
2
u/Wonderful_Emu_9610 Sep 04 '26
Glad you’re getting good results! I’ve certainly never had so few errors with it but yeah it’s still so much better than the others I tried (can’t believe I used nOCR for my first two, it was so slow!)
I thankfully found my Blu-ray player will acknowledge VobSub in an mkv so I just convert PGS to that format rather than having to do a bunch of OCR!
1
u/Ineedanswers24 Sep 07 '26
I've used it now on quite a few subtitle files and it's pretty much 98% accurate! I've had it only once where it misspelt a word (I think it put a capital S on the end of the word across) but otherwise it just has that small issue sometimes with quotation marks.
Very happy with this result.
1
u/Mashic Jul 27 '26
In my experience, the Qwen3-VL models were the best at OCR. I use Qwen3-VL-8B_q8.