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!

Can you support more video / audio file formats?

This app relies on the browser's built-in media player to decode the video / audio file you load. So the supported formats are determined by your browser and there is nothing I can do about it. For example, Safari and Microsoft Edge support the AC3 format, while Chrome and Firefox do not. That said, you can still use ffmpeg to convert your media files to a supported format before loading them into the editor.

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.