Getting Started With Subtitles

Maybe you have certain films on your computer and you would like some subtitles for them?

Where can you find those subtitles? How can you play them? And what if you want to edit or create them from scratch for maybe a self-made video or corporate video?

Where To Find Existing Subtitles?

If you download some foreign movies or rip them from DVD, then they don’t always contain the subtitles of your preferred language.

Luckily there are quite a lot of databases on the internet that offer subtitles in various languages like OpenSubtitles.org. But of course you can google for subtitle databases and find everything you need.

These subtitles are mostly available as srt- or sub-format.

How To Play Subtitles?

The free software VLC Media Player allows you to play subtitles directly with the corresponding movie. One condition to do this is to give the subtitle file the exact same name as the movie file. (except for the extension) and you have to save both files in the same folder.

If the subtitles don’t completely sync up with the images, then you can move them slightly forward or backward. Click here to read more on how to do that.

Edit Subtitles or Create You Own Subtitles

Granted, not all subtitles that are found online are good quality. Would you like to make some changes to them or even creating your own subtitles? Then you can use the free software Subtitle Edit.

With this program you can import existing subtitles and adjust them manually, but there are also several automatic tasks like replacing certain words, merging short sentences, splitting long sentences, change the case and so on.

The result is displayed by default in Microsoft DirectShow but you can also use VLC Media Player.

Subtitle Edit allows you to use Google Translate to translate subtitles. Both versions are displayed neatly together and bad translations you can adjust manually.

Also very useful is that Subtitle Edit can display the audio as a sound wave, making it even easier to synchronize manually.

Alternatively you can use SubMagic which is also very good but has quite less features.

For a very small subtitling job, I would suggest to use the title creation function in your editing software and just add the subtitles manually to your video.

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