Subtitle Player

How to play a video with subtitles in your browser

1. Open the subtitle file

   Drop your .srt, .vtt, .ass, .sbv or .sub file into the box above, or click to browse. Don’t have one at hand? Try the sample.

2. Open your video

   Click “Open a video to check” and pick the film or episode the subtitles belong to. It plays right here, from your disk, with the subtitles on the picture. Full screen works too.

3. Nudge the timing

   Play a line of dialogue. If the text appears after the voice, press −0.1 s or −1 s. If it appears before, press +0.1 s or +1 s. The video follows every press, so you see straight away whether it now matches.

4. Download the synced file

   When the subtitles match, click Download. You get the same format you opened, with every line moved by the offset shown. Just watching? You don’t need to download anything.

Why subtitles are early or late

A subtitle file stores a start and end time for every line, counted from the beginning of the video. Those times only match the release they were made for. Watch a different release and the same line can come seconds early or late.

A different intro. A TV recording, a streaming copy and a Blu-ray rip often start differently: a studio logo, a recap or a few seconds of black more or less at the beginning. Every line is then off by the same amount from start to finish. That is the problem this player fixes, and it is by far the most common one.

A different frame rate. Subtitles made for a 25 fps PAL copy and played on a 23.976 fps release (or the other way round) start in sync and drift further off as the film goes on, by several minutes over a feature film. One offset can’t fix that, because the gap keeps growing. Use Change Subtitle Frame Rate first, then come back here for any delay that is left.

A different cut. An extended edition or a TV version with scenes removed is in sync until the first changed scene, then jumps. For that, move only the lines after the cut with Shift Subtitle Timing, which lets you pick a range of lines.

More on telling these apart in How to fix subtitles out of sync.

Why play subtitles in the browser

Desktop players can load a subtitle file too, and VLC even has a delay shortcut. But the delay you set in a player stays in that player: the next time, or on your TV, the subtitles are off again. Here the offset goes into the file itself, so every player and TV shows it in sync afterwards.

It also helps when you only need to look: to check that a downloaded file belongs to your video before a movie night, to read a WebVTT caption file from a course or a YouTube download, or to watch on a computer where you can’t install software. A .vtt file is plain text and most systems open it in a text editor; here it plays with the picture. See What is a VTT file? for what is inside one.

Tips

Use big steps first, then small ones. Press ±1 s until the text is close to the voice, then fine-tune with ±0.1 s. A gap of a tenth of a second is hard to notice.

Judge by a clear line. Pick a short line that starts right after a pause, not one in the middle of fast dialogue. It is much easier to see whether it appears with the voice.

No sound? Watch the lips. If the audio track can’t play in the browser, a close-up of someone speaking is enough to set the timing.

Wrong letters on screen? If the subtitles show é or question marks instead of accented letters, fix the file with Fix Subtitle Encoding first, then play it here.

Need to fix a word too? The Subtitle Editor plays the same video next to every line, so you can correct text and set a single line’s times from the picture.