The constantly visible words on your screen that hinder your complete movie watching experience; subtitles might seem a little annoying to you initially. However, once you get used to them, you’ll hardly want to watch any of your videos without subtitles. Let us be a help in that case! In this step-by-step guide, we’ll tell you how you can add subtitles to your favorite videos and movies using any media player of your wish.
Reasons for Adding Subtitles to Your Videos
Whether it’s your habit or you’re desiring subtitles for a particular video, there can be any reason why you’d want to add subtitles to a video on a media player:
- In case you’re watching a foreign language movie or anime, you’d want to add subtitles to them to get the complete understanding of it by its translation.
- You understand the language used in the video but don’t completely comprehend the accents! That’s where subtitles will help you to make the most of your movie watching experience.
- You may need subtitles to follow along a typical historical movie or science-fiction where they use a lot of proper nouns and difficult expressions.
The problem is when you download a video from the Internet; you generally don’t get subtitles with it. In that case, you will have to install subtitles to movies by yourself. Well, worry not! This isn’t as difficult as it may sound. Scroll down the post to learn the ways that help you get translation support for the video you’re watching.
Add Subtitles to Your Videos in a Media Player
Automatic Subtitle Overlay during Playback
This method is useful if you have only one subtitle file. A modern media player like VLC will automatically detect the subtitles and start loading them while your movie runs. To overlay a subtitle file automatically on your movie, you need to ensure two things:
- Keep the file in the same folder where your movie file is stored.
- Name this subtitle (srt) file the same as your movie file (excluding the extension).
It should look like this:
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Manual Subtitle Overlay during Playback
Manual subtitle overlay is useful in three cases: you don’t want to keep the files’ names similar; your player (e.g. VLC) is unable to identify the subtitle file; or you have multiple subtitle files for the same video.
To add subtitles to movies manually, simply open the menu and click on Subtitle > Add Subtitle File… Now, browse your srt file and once found, add it to your video.
Burn Subtitles into a Video File
This method is a little trickier than the methods above. Embed your downloaded subtitles into your video to use it on other devices by using the DVD ripping tool named, Handbrake. Once you’ve launched the tool, do as follows:
- Click on the “Subtitles” tab
- Choose “Add External SRT” to locate the subtitle file you have downloaded
- Add the subtitle to your video by selecting “Start”
This method has its own twists while locating the right subtitle for your video in the first shot. However, you can still trust Handbrake as it is free and supports almost all video formats.
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