The player will not show the subtitles

SubtitleConverter » Use cases » The player will not show the subtitles

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The situation

The subtitle file is there, next to the video, correctly named - and the player ignores it. Or the TV shows a "subtitle format not supported" message, or the editing tool imports the video but not the captions.

Every player supports a slightly different set. One wants .srt, a web player wants .vtt, an old DVD-era file arrives as .smi or MicroDVD .sub, and a broadcast or accessibility workflow uses TTML or DFXP. The text is fine; the container is the problem.

What you do

1. Point SubtitleConverter at the folder of subtitle files.
2. Choose the format the player actually wants.
3. Run it. Every file is converted, with its name kept, so each .srt still sits next to the matching video.

More than ten formats are supported - SRT, VTT, ASS/SSA, XML/TTML, DFXP, SMI, MicroDVD (.sub), SubViewer2.0, YouTube (.sbv), LRC and more - and the conversion is done on your machine, so a folder of subtitles never has to be uploaded anywhere.

What it will not do

• It does not retime the subtitles. It converts the format; if the captions are out of sync with the video, adjusting the timecodes is a different job.
• It does not translate. The text is carried across unchanged - there is no machine translation in the tool.
• It does not burn subtitles into the video, and it does not mux them into a container. It produces subtitle files.
• It does not style captions. Formatting that only exists in one format (advanced ASS positioning, for example) is not recreated in a simpler one.

Related

Converting a whole season in one go: batch convert subtitles. A single file: convert a subtitle file. Subtitles for a web player: SRT to VTT.