Subtitle Edit is a very good free, open source subtitle editor that pretty much does it all.
With Subtitle Edit, you can create your own subtitles, edit or sync better old subtitles, extract subtitles from a video even in Greek with audio to text, translate existing subtitles to another language, compare subtitles, embed or separate subtitles from a video, and much more.
In short, you can do it all and it's considered an essential tool by those involved in pirate subtitling, and overall it's a program worth looking into a little more.
But first let's go over some terminology and techniques for our new readers.
What are subtitles?
When a movie's subtitles are not embedded within the movie file, they may well be a separate file that should have exactly the same name with the name of the movie and ending with .srt.
For example, if your video is titled “MyVideo123.mkv”, the SRT file must be titled “MyVideo123.srt” to work. Also, you can write whatever you want in the subtitle file name at the end, as long as it contains the full name of the movie file at the beginning.
For example the subtitles in the above example could be named “MyVideo123.srt” or “MyVideo123-ellinika.srt” or “MyVideo123-dimitris-iguru.srt”. The subtitles file can either be in the exact same folder as the movie or in a subfolder named “Subs”, one level below the movie folder.
If you follow these rules then most movie player software (Vlc, BS.Player etc) as well as TVs will show you the subtitles alongside the movie.
Writing subtitles
The syntax of these files is simple and easy to read. It consists of groups of rows and each group consists of a sequence number, below the start time and end time of the subtitle with an arrow in between and then directly below the subtitle.
So these files are essentially text files in encoding either ANSI or UTF-8. Rarely, files with Unicode encoding are uploaded, but in this case the subtitle will not play correctly with the movie 99% of the time.
In the event that you do not see the Greek characters when the movie is playing, it means that either the device (PC, TV, media player, etc.) or the program you are using does not recognize the specific encoding, so you must change it to the next one. If they don't see ANSI go to UTF-8 and vice versa.
About Subtitle Edit
The Subtitle Edit program allows you to don't work in a dull and unwelcoming text program, but in a better organized and more interactive environment.
The program has a highly functional interface, where you can see the subtitles (regular and translated), the movie, and the sound in a graphical waveform.
The program is free, open source and receives very frequent updates from its manufacturer. His official website is here and you can download it from here. The current version is 4.0.3 and was released on Christmas 2023.
You can run it on Windows and on Linux (in the portable version). On Windows you can choose between the installed version or the Portable version.
The use of the Greek language is supported in menu and in the dialogue framework of the program.
Features and functions
Subtitle Edit can display the contents of a subtitle file line by line, giving you the ability to intervene and make a multitude of settings. It supports over 25 subtitle file types and can convert them from one file type to another.
In addition to opening a subtitle file, it can import subtitles directly from a DVD or from matroska-style files with embedded subtitles. It also works with Tesseract optical character reader (OCR) to import non-ascii subtitles, such as sub/idx or .sup found on Blu-ray discs.
You can set the start, end and display duration of each subtitle line. With the help of the Wave form control you can have a visual representation of the sound of the dialogues, to precisely adjust their appearance.
Additionally it can play the movie to preview the subtitles using the DirectShow filter or VLC media player if it is installed on your computer.
An extremely useful feature of it is the translation of subtitles. This can be done either manually, line by line, or automatically through Google Translate or LibreTranslate, My memory translate, Papago (doesn't have Greek), Microsoft Bing Translate, ChatGPT, DeepL (the last three need an API).
In addition, it offers the possibility of spell checking, so that you can correct the mistakes that may be present in the subtitle files that you are editing.
Finally, it can extract subtitles from any video, even in the Greek language, through it mode audio-to-text.
In our tests it managed to render the Greek, although it was quite popular, just fine, and then translate it into English, despite the idioms they contained.
Also in our tests, it managed to fully render the lyrics of the song Mishale by Andru Donalds, but also of "Feel It Still" by Portugal.The Man, even though the voice was accompanied by music and indeed singers, with dragging of the words etc. .
Learning and use
The program is relatively easy to use, especially for simple tasks. For the more complex ones, it takes a little more learning time to familiarize yourself with all its functions. For this purpose, you can also use the help file it has.
Especially in the synchronization of subtitles you will have to enter the fields of ftps and the many possibilities of arranging the times it has.
