Benshi (弁士) were Japanese performers who provided live narration for silent films (both Japanese films and Western films). Benshi are sometimes called katsudō-benshi (活動弁士) or katsuben (活弁). wiki

This little cli-tool is based in SubtitleEdit. Which at the release of this software the CLI Converter was not totally platform-independant.

You can download a binary specific for your platform in the Releases page (not yet there). Then you can just run katsuben like this:

Windows

katsuben -i input_subtitle.srt -o vtt

MacOS and Linux

./katsuben -i input_subtitle.srt -o vtt

The result of this command will leave in the same directory, used for the input, a new file with the converted subtitle.

Find more information on how to use the tool with the help command:

./katsuben -h

katsuben:
  Subtitle Converter using LibSE (Subtitle Edit)

Usage:
  katsuben [options]

Options:
  -i, --input <input> (REQUIRED)      The input subtitle to be converted
  -o, --output <output> (REQUIRED)    The output subtitle format extension to be converted
  -e, --encoding <encoding>           The encoding for the output file (default: utf-8) [default: utf-8]
  --version                           Show version information
  -?, -h, --help                      Show help and usage information

Katsuben requires NET5.0 or higher for development and executions with platform dependant binaries.

You can contribute to this project by opening a Pull Requests or an Issue.