Subtitle Edit

Subtitle Edit is a subtitle editor for Windows that covers the whole job of getting captions onto a video: writing them, retiming them, converting between formats and repairing the timing damage that comes from a different release of the same film. It is free and open source under the MIT licence, and current releases also build for macOS and Linux, although Windows remains the platform with the longest history and the most complete feature set.

What it does with a subtitle file

The editor opens the formats that matter in practice: SubRip (SRT), WebVTT, Advanced SubStation Alpha (ASS and SSA), TTML and DFXP, SAMI, MicroDVD, EBU STL and several broadcast variants. Video preview is built in, with a waveform and a spectrogram beside the picture, so you can see where a line of dialogue actually starts instead of guessing from a number. For image-based subtitles such as VobSub and PGS tracks, an OCR workflow extracts the text and lets you correct what it read. A batch converter, driven from the interface or from the separate SeConv command-line tool, processes whole folders in one pass.

The retiming workflow

Timing is where most subtitle work really happens. The frame-rate conversion tool fixes files authored for a different speed, "adjust all times" shifts the whole file forward or backward, point sync aligns two points in your subtitle with two points in a reference file, and the visual sync view lets you nudge individual lines against the video. Reading speed checks flag lines that stay on screen too briefly, and the fix-common-errors wizard cleans up overlapping entries, empty lines, badly broken lines and inconsistent formatting in one reviewable pass. Spell check uses OpenOffice or Hunspell dictionaries, and translation of a whole file is possible through online services when you supply the required key.

Practical configuration and limits

Almost everything is configurable, which is both the appeal and part of the learning curve: display settings, formatting rules, the video player used for preview and the default save format all live in separate dialogs. The built-in player is meant for previewing, not for editing video, so burning captions into a finished picture is handed to an external tool such as ffmpeg. OCR accuracy depends on the quality of the source track, and machine translation output should always be reviewed by someone who speaks the target language before it is published.

Who should choose something else

Aegisub remains the stronger choice for elaborate ASS typesetting, karaoke timing and effects that depend on per-syllable styling. If all you need is to shift one file by a few seconds, a small player-side subtitle delay setting is faster than opening an editor at all. And if your work is part of a professional localisation pipeline with review workflows and billing, a commercial subtitling suite will fit those processes better than a desktop utility.