How to Extract Text From a Video on Mac

Updated October 16, 2026 · By A17Lab

Macs have surprisingly good text recognition built in — with one catch. Live Text in Quick Look, Preview, and Safari reads a paused frame, one at a time. For a screenshot, that's perfect. For a video where text appears across dozens of moments — captions, slides, code, signs — you become the scanner, scrubbing frame by frame. Here's how to extract text from a video on Mac in a single pass instead.

The one-frame problem with Live Text on macOS

• Pause, select, copy, repeat. Every piece of text needs you to find its frame first.
• No collected output. There's no way to gather everything into one list or file.
• No timestamps. You can't tell where in the video a line appeared, or turn the lines into subtitles.

Scan the whole video: the Mac workflow

1. Install Extract Text From Video for Mac from the Mac App Store (macOS 13 or later; one download covers iPhone and iPad too).
2. Drag in your file. MP4, MOV, AVI, and WMV videos or JPG, PNG, WEBP, HEIC images. Use Crop Video to limit detection to one region — like the lower-third where subtitles live.
3. Click Detect Text. The OCR engine reads every frame on-device and lists each detected line in the Results panel. It recognizes 18 languages, or detects the language automatically.
4. Copy All or download. Grab one line, copy the entire list in a click, or download the results as an SRT subtitle file or a PDF.

What Mac users scan most

• Recorded meetings and webinars — slide content into notes (screen recording guide)
• Tutorials — commands and code copied character-perfect (YouTube guide)
• Burned-in subtitles — to a text file in minutes (subtitle guide)
• Photos and scans — handwritten notes and documents become copyable text

On Windows instead? The same engine ships as Image to Text for Windows, and there's a Chrome extension for grabbing text without leaving the browser.