A Guide To Grabbing Soft Subs From Almost Any Niche Video Platform Ever
Step 1: Open the website of the video which you know has soft subs options
(For this tutorial, I'm using Chrome browser and grabbing Mandate soft subs from Gagaoolala but this method should work 90% of the time with any browser/basic video streaming platform that isn't strictly copyright protected like Netflix for example)
Step 2: Before pressing play on the video, right click on your screen and choose Inspect (last option)
Step 3: Choose Network in the tab that opened up on the right side of your browser. If it doesn't show Network as picture below, the arrow button should lead you to a drop down menu that has the Network option.
Step 4: In the Filter search query space, type "vtt" (I usually go for vtt because my experience with grabbing soft subs is that most of them are in VTT files)
Step 5: Press play on the video (or Refresh the page if you had accidentally press play prior to typing vtt in the search)
Step 6: Using intuition (or actually keep testing out files using the following method), right click on an appearing vtt file and choose 'Open in new tab'
Step 6: Go the newly opened tab and see if it's a file that has timestamps and lines (indicating that it is a subtitle file). If it is indeed a subtitle file, press Ctrl+S (or right click and choose Save as) and save the subtitle file to your computer
(Optional) Step 7: Drag and drop the newly saved VTT file into Subtitle Edit (download), choose File -> Save as (or press Ctrl + Shift+ S) and save file as SubRip (*.srt) file. You have to scroll all the way up in the drop down menu as it is the default/first option.
(Optional) Step 8: Rename your file exactly how your MP4/MKV file is name and add '.en' before '.srt' if you want your subtitle file to be recognised as English
Unrelated tip: Subtitle Edit allows you to extract SRT from MKVs that have embed official subtitles (like the mkvs one might download from MKVDrama).
For example, this is how my Subtitle Edit screen looks like when I drag and drop my Shine Episode 8 MKV file into it. Choose eng track -> Press OK -> File -> Save as.
As a gifmaker, sometimes I find it handy to have the subtitle files either in SRT or TXT form just to copy the captions without have to open the video files again and manually type in the subtitles when I'm making gifs, so I hope this is somewhat useful.
Alternatively: the easiest way (which I actually use more) is to straight up download the subtitle file through Internet Download Manager (which I have the lifetime license for, I know I sound like their PR girl but trust that I am not ಥ_ಥ it's just too good of a software). Usually soft subs come in either vtt, ass or srt files and IDM recognises them for me so I don't have to do any steps above other than press Download. If they are vtt or ass files, after I download them, I'd load them into Subtitle Edit and convert them to SRT files so I could nix them into my MKV files with MKVToolNix.
