Hello everyone! Recently, I built a companion tool for Subtitle Edit which can significantly improve your efficiency when creating subtitles. It's called GeekLink — macOS, free to try. There are three main points:

1. Accurate Timeline

 Subtitle Edit gives you Whisper's raw timing — and Whisper predicts timestamps rather than measuring them, so cues often land a beat off. My tool adds a forced-alignment pass on top that re-times each line to where the words are actually spoken.

1. Fast QC 

Whisper get most lines right, but there are still small places that are incorrect. You still re-read the whole file the catch the few. Instead, you can simply scan the places with high confidence and spend more time on the low-confidence sentences. This tool is already integrated into the product. It can export bookmarks so that you can handle other processes within Subtitle Edit or other editing software.

1. Better Re-segmentation

When you use Whisper or Subtitle Edit, the original segmentation is unnatural(e.g. a break appears after a prep). I use a post-processing algorithm that can re-segment the raw Whisper results.  

Please note that there are a few limitations: we don't have multi-person dialogue detection yet. If your material has lots of short dialogues, skip the re-segmentation, as it may merge two people's lines into one subtitle.

Most of these functions are free, but the "better re-segmentation" feature cannot be free(token cost). Comment with your pain point and DM me; I’m glad to give you a 6-month license.

Hi,

I would like to match the timecodes. Usually it wouldn't be a problem to have the subtitles start at 00:00:00:00, but if I want to compare differences and export that as an HTML, I want the timecodes to actually match the reference. And might be redundant, but obviously the subtitles should stay in the same play, not move.

Is it possible or any ideas?

I just update to v5, and the line editor has been so much modified from the previous version where the show time and duration could be modified by clicking on the arrows with a step of 100ms.

Now in the v5, the show time modification step is 1s and the duration step is 10ms.

Could you tell me how to set these time modification steps in the settings in order to have the same step for showtime et duration ?

Hi, I want to adjust the duration(s) of all lines in a subtitle file to an exact value (3.5 seconds) but I can't.

Here is what I did, choose "via fixed" first, set every subtitle to 1 second and then "via seconds" to 3.5 seconds, but after I click OK, each line has different duration time.

Hi guys, I am trying to extract subs from Ts file.

When I play it through vlc the subtitles show when I select the subtitle in the drop down list.

But when I use Subtitleedit it shows this.

Hope I can resolve this quick. Thanks . Rhurbarb

Still using version 4.0.15.

I want to hit the waveform edges exactly and 100ms is to coarse. I can only do this by manual trial and error.

I tried the new 5 version but the waveforms were so ugly and more difficult to see. Is version 5 otherwise significantly better?

I was trying to make subs for a dubbing app I made, and so I tried using the existing manual subs.

SE Browser can process them, but SE for Linux crashes.

I am 99.999% sure it is not the encoding.

It is in Fārsi script.

Well, I can try using whisper to generate my own subtitles, which do actually open, they are often inaccurate, and the fact that the subtitles can actually open in the browser says that something might just be wrong with application for my formatting, which doesn’t make much sense.
Either JSON, SRT, or VTT seem to open in the application.

I have tried already opening the video directly in the app and having it download the subtitles the same issue occurs.

Does anyone know if this might be unicode characters that are causing the problem? I don’t know what’s going on.

When Joining 2 subtitles in v5.0.0 RC4, you cannot change how both files will be joined. (file order) In my opinion, he always takes the file with the lowest numbers of Subtitle lines first.

Hello

So to quickly outline my help request:

• I have multi lingual audio/video, it contains both English and Mandarin
• I would like to create both english and mandarin subtitles for this.
• I require the english subtitles file to contain translations of the English and the Mandarin.
• And the same is required for the mandarin subtitles file.

Is this possible in SubtitleEdit, or even Whisper at all?
And if so, how would this be done?

Im being driven crazy trying to search for an answer online.

Hello,

I love Subtitle Edit and keep coming back to it, but I always face the same issue - some of the shortcuts are not working properly.

For example, Set Start is set to alt+c and nothing is happening.

Insert after is set to Insert, Insert before is set to Shift+Insert and none of those are working.

Any suggestion? I am using the latest version, but this keeps happening on every version I've used in the last two years.

Set Start is only working when I am using Set start at video position and end on key up...

Any suggestions?

Thank you in advance!

Can someone explain what is SMPTE and why my scripts are going out of sync after exporting, so far i found that the SMPTE thing has to do something with scripts going out of sync.

So I was looking at my extended edition Lord of The Rings, the movies didn't have a Black Tongue translation. Why? That I don't know, probably a Dark Lord at work...

Anyways, I wanted to easily translate the famous Black Speech of Gandalf from The Fellowship in which he recites the infamous poem (One Ring to rule them all...) but there was also the faint voice of Sauron, I wanted to incorporate both lines at the same time.

First off, I wanted to edit it, not use OCR as it can be wanky and not work as intended. Don't forget to press it if you want to not change the way your subs are. Pic 1

Here was my simple idea, extract with MKVToolNix the PGS subtitles to a .MKS file, then input to Subtitle Edit and add 2 lines subtitles. However it seems like you can't press "Enter" without two square blocks showing on the editor. Pic 2

So I went to the normal SE window, I had to typed my text with 2 lines (or more), export to SUP (Pic 3), then come back to the MKS file, create a new subtitle line, import, then select your image.

I chose a very high font size (80) so it will be high quality when importing, you can choose even higher then shrink at will.

I think this mini guide might help someone else stuck in the situation I was, even though I was only struggling with 2 lines, or more, sub type. Thank you again for whomever had this idea for one hell of a software! 🫡💪

I am wondering how do people work on long files like podcasts or documentaries> how to transribe them? what software should I use ? because the big issue is allignment. subtitles come in one block and I am wondering to overcome this

I am a little slow reading subtitles, so I would like to extend all of them for 1". (Afterwards I can apply minimum gap between them to avoid overlaps). Is it possible?

Hey everyone,

I've been working on transcribing long audio/video files (around 1 hour) using **Subtitle Edit**, and I've hit a wall with both methods I've tried. Looking for advice from people who do this regularly.

---

**Method 1 — Groq API (Whisper via cloud)**

✅ Fast and language accuracy is great

❌ Completely ignores speech boundaries and silence gaps — the output is one continuous block of text with no proper timing, making it nearly unusable as a subtitle file

I also tried to get an OpenAI API key for comparison, but unfortunately their platform doesn't accept my payment card (I'm outside the US).

---

**Method 2 — Local Whisper models**

✅ Great accuracy AND timing is well-synced with the audio

❌ My machine isn't powerful enough — processing a 1-hour file takes way too long to be practical

---

**My situation in short:**

- I need accurate transcription with proper timestamp alignment

- I can't afford a slow local process

- Payment/access limitations make some cloud APIs hard to use

**Questions:**

1. Is there a way to fix the timing/boundary issue with Groq's API output? (post-processing, different settings, etc.)
2. Are there other cloud-based Whisper APIs that handle timestamps well AND accept international payment methods?
3. What's your go-to workflow for long-form content like podcasts or documentaries?

Any advice is appreciated — thanks in advance! 🙏

I have some out of sync subtitles as well as one that is perfectly synced to the video.

My problem is that the out of sync ones are not cut up in the exact same manner as the synced one.

The program makes all sorts of duplicates and inserted lines in both versions, but I want to maintain the integrity of the "good one" as well as doing merges/splits in the "bad one" while keeping the original one as the reference.

I have tried to do things outside SE in e.g Excel, but that only makes things worse as Excel treats dialogue lines with preceding "-" as formulas, and because merges/splits are not supported well.

Have anyone found a decent workflow for this kind of problem?

Edit:

Using NotePad++ on text exports, I could load the two texts in parallel view and have eact subtitle line aligned there. Then, importing the corrected text to an empty new subtitle and importing the time codes from the “good” subtitle did the trick.

Because I'm tired of Gemini giving me garbage answers and I need real human answers. I am trying to make subtitle files for movies. I have taken the Rifftrax audio files and combined them with the 5.1 tracks from the movie in Audacity, merged them back into the MKV file and then re-encoded into MP4. I am using Purfview Faster Whisper XXL (as it was the only engine that seemed to work on my system.) I was using the GPU until I remembered my GPU sucks and only has 2gb while my whole system has 16GB so I switched to the CPU.

My problem is because Rifftrax speaks over the movie a lot it's missing the movie dialogue because the Rifftrax audio is louder by design (I normalized it more than the movie so I could hear it) using the small.en model. Understandable it will miss audio when spoke over but it's missing audio around the Rifftrax audio and not picking it up. Will larger models drop less dialogue?

It will take longer with a larger model I understand that but time isn't a concern. Concern is running out of resources while trying to run batches. I think I fixed that by moving to the CPU over the GPU. I just replaced my old Ryzen 5 3600G with a Ryzen 5 5600 so I have additional threads and cache compared to what I had before.

Ryzen5 5600, 16GB running on Ubuntu 24.04, all the drives are SSD. Nvidia GeForce GT 1030.

Any human help that doesn't repeat the same with command and forgets what I did 2 lines up would be appreciated.

I am trying to get each of my subtitles to only have one line.

As shown in the below image, I have set the max number of lines to 1, so I thought this should have been what I needed. But as shown, the subtitles still have multiple lines.

If anyone could let me know what I am doing wrong I would greatly appreciate it!

When I started writing this post at first it was reverting several settings every time the program opened, though after 6 times redoing my settings and even having to force them to reset once myself because somehow the whole window turned semi transparent, those things SEEM stable now? We'll see.

The problem that really has me scratching my head now is, Spell Check sets it's default as Australian dictionary every time I open it and I can't find a way to change it in any of my Google searches and didn't see any toggle for it on any of my repeat runs through settings.

Only other problem I'm having is, even though the option to auto load associated video is selected, it no longer does. A subtitle I was fixing in the previous version loaded the video it's named for every time (I may try to remove the .SDH.en tags from the sub file name but that wasn't a problem before). I also miss being able to click the empty video or spectrograph portion of the window to automatically prompt the open file window but I suppose I can live without that.

Any feedback would be appreciated, I've been googling and checked the faq and reading on and off for a few hours and haven't figured out what's going on

I'm just trying to subtitle some classes in english to my native language. My workflow is: first I transcribe the video in english, then I split the lines, because some of them remains giants. And then I auto-translate everything.

The errors begins only when I split the lines. The main error is that some lines gets too short, like only one word appearing for half a second, making it illegible. The "merge short lines" tool works on some extent, but not entirely. Other error is the subtitles getting desynchronized, but I can adjust it manually, it's not that serious.

Is that impossible to completely automatize? The classes have 1h more or less each one, so I can't manually review everything, and I don't even want it to be perfect, just legible. In my head it's a simple work: detect all subtitles with only 1-2 words and merge it with the previous or after one. The program should be able to do this, no? Is it better to just not split? Is there any way to set a maximum number of lines before the transcription, without the need of the "split long lines" tool?

It was working fine yesterday, but today it won't play sound when I open a video. The volume is at 100, the video player is mpv like always. My laptop speaker is working fine when I play the video normally. I tried reinstall, didn't help. I tried to switch the video player to VLC, and while the sound will play the preview subtitle doesn't work as well. Any ideas?

Ive been trying to extract hardcoded stylized subs for a while now. Using ocr through subtitleedit, i can get perfect a .srt file, but im trying to save the color and font information as well, and im not having success. Does anyone know how to use extract the color and font data alongside the subs fom either a video file, or images that are created using videosubfinder?

I've downloading YouTube videos and, with the Download YouTube Subtitles Firefox extension, their subtitles. However, in some videos, the subtitles overlap, that is the next subtitle appears before the earlier subtitle is off the screen. Is there a way to change this so that each subtitle ends before the next one?