Extract text from Blu-ray subtitles (PGS)
To convert PGS subtitles to another format, you need Subtitle Edit or other Video software.
To convert other file formats to the "Blu-ray Subtitle File" file type, you need software like Subtitle Edit or a similar tool.
The .PGS file extension primarily functions as a Presentation Graphic Stream, the standard subtitle format used on Blu-ray discs. Less commonly, it acts as a PageStream Document, a legacy desktop publishing format developed by Grasshopper LLC. Blu-ray .PGS files consist entirely of rasterized bitmap images and timing data, unlike standard text-based subtitles. This design presents significant disadvantages: the files are extremely large (often exceeding 50MB), completely unsearchable, and cannot be dynamically styled or resized by media players. Furthermore, most web browsers, smart TVs, and software like Plex struggle to play them directly, often forcing media servers to undergo CPU-heavy video transcoding to burn the images into the video track.
To make these subtitles widely compatible, users must convert .PGS to lightweight, text-based formats like SRT, VTT, or ASS. This is a major conversion challenge because standard text-extraction fails. You cannot simply save the file differently; you must process the bitmaps through Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software like Subtitle Edit to recreate the text. If your .PGS is a PageStream Document, the closed, proprietary architecture locks your layout data, requiring the original software to safely export it to PDF.
Because .PGS files are either complex raw image sequences or highly proprietary layout documents, standard online converters fail to process them. Just drag and drop your file to identify the format, view it, and convert it when possible using convert.guru.
Convert.Guru analyzes your PGS file, detects the exact format, and lets you read the text inside.
Users also converted SUP, PAGES, DLW, NDCT and 85V files.
If you want to convert PGS file to INDD, QXP, PUB, PMD, PM6, PM7, PM8, PM9, PM10, PM11, OMP or P65, you can use Subtitle Edit or similar software from the "Blu-ray Subtitle Stream" category. In the File menu, look for Save As… or Export….
To convert MDI, PUB, PDP, PM4, P65, COMIC, WEBTEMPLATE, PMD, SPUB, INDD, PM5 or QXP files to PGS, try Subtitle Edit or another comparable tool in the "Blu-ray Subtitle Stream" category.
The history of Convert.Guru began over 25 years ago in California with Tom Simondi’s file-format database. A former contributor to Space Shuttle development and a software pioneer of the 1980s, Simondi established a trusted resource for file type analysis that was even referenced by Microsoft Windows XP. Today, we use modern technology to process and convert thousands of file formats while continually improving our PGS converter.