Frequently Asked Questions

Why another subtitle editor?

Yes I know, there are many subtitle editors out there. But I found that none of them is ideal for me so I built this one. Below are the editors that I have tried and what I think are missing in them:

• Happy Scribe offers a free online subtitle editor. No account registration is required. Editing subtitles and previewing with the video is very easy. It is the closest to what I need. Unfortunately, it's missing waveform visualization, which is deal breaker for me. It is not open sourced either and we can't customize it.
• Subtitle Edit is a great option and has all features I need. It supports waveform visualization, easy preview and editing, and even AI transcriptions. But it is a desktop software which requires installation, and it doesn't support Mac. I have to use a Windows or Linux device to edit subtitles.
• Aegisub is similar to Subtitle Edit. It is a desktop software suitable for more complex subtitle editing. Also I found waveform visualizer not very intuitive. (Btw these desktop softwares have 1990s-style UI which really demoralizes me)
• Other options such as Open Subtitle Editor or Movavi are either too complex and feature-bloated, or are not free.

None of them is open-sourced, and the UIs are either too ugly or too complex, which really bothers my subtitle editing experience. What I want is an editor that is:

1. Permanently free
2. Open-sourced
3. Fully web-based, no download or installation required
4. No account sign-up or log-in required
5. Minimalist UX
6. Has waveform visualization

So I built this one.

Will you actively maintain this app?

This app is open sourced on GitHub laubonghaudoi/subtitle-editor. I will check issues and accept PRs regularly, but I am quite busy these days so I may not have time to develop new features. This is a community project and your contributions are always welcomed!

Have feedback?

Feel free to open an issue on GitHub. I want to keep this app as minimalistic as possible, so these features are non-goals and I don't plan to add them:

• Account registration
• Cloud storage
• Collaborative editing
• AI transcription
• Translation
• Complex subtitle editing such as VTT files.

I discussed my reasoning for not including them in this GitHub issue. If you need any of these advanced features, please use the other options I listed above.

I need an AI transcriber / srt generator, any recommendations?

Yes I recommend generating the srt file with an AI transcriber first, then editing it with this editor. That's why I listed "AI transcriptions" as a non-goal above. It's much easier to just use a specialized tool for that than building it into this editor. There are many free srt generators available on huggingface, such as:

• k2-fsa/generate-subtitles-for-videos
• BatuhanYilmaz/Whisper-Auto-Subtitled-Video-Generator
• NeuralFalcon/Whisper-Turbo-Subtitle

You can also download Subtitle Edit I mentioned above, which has built-in AI transcription capabilities.

I want to download a YouTube video and extract the subtitles of it, how?

Use yt-dlp. It's free and the most reliable YouTube video downloader. It also supports downloading subtitles directly if they are available.