Subtitld: A Cross-Platform Open-Source Subtitle Editor

Subtitles make the experience of watching a video seamless. You do not need to necessarily understand the language of the video, the subtitle helps you figure out what’s happening with a text version of the audio in your preferred language.

You get subtitles for most of the content in streaming platforms you might have to add subtitles for some videos that you have in your local collection.

While you can do that by simply downloading SRT files and loading it up using the video player, how do you edit it, remove it, or transcribe a video? Subtitld is an open-source subtitle editor that comes to the rescue.

Subtitld: Create, Remove, Slice, and Transcribe Subtitles

Subtitld is a free and open-source project that lets you make the most out of your subtitles.

subtitld editor

If you do not have a subtitle, create one, if you need to edit it, go ahead. With this open-source tool, you get many options to work with the subtitles.

In other words, it is a full-fledged subtitle editor and one of its kind (as far as I’ve come across).

Let me highlight some key features before you decide to try it.

Features of Subtitld

subtitld export

It offers a great deal of functions, while not everyone needs all of them, but if you are someone who regularly creates, edits, and works with subtitles, it should come in pretty handy.

Here’s a list of them:

  • Create subtitles
  • Edit subtitles
  • Move subtitles using a timeline to sync manually
  • Zoom in/out function to help with a crowded timeline
  • Supports saving to SRT file format
  • Supports various other formats to import and export (SSA, TTML, SBV, DFXP, VTT, XML, SCC and SAMI)
  • Easy to resize or adjust the duration of a subtitle from the timeline
  • Merge with other subtitles or just slice a subtitle in a project
  • Ability to enable grids to visualize by frames, scenes, or seconds
  • Playback in the editor to check how the subtitles work
  • Snap the subtitles in the timeline to avoid overlapping
  • Add/remove among the subtitles
  • Enable safety margins to ensure that the subtitles do not look improper
  • Adjust the playback speed
  • Keyboard shortcuts available
  • Auto-transcribe
  • Export videos with subtitles burned in
  • Unlimited undo

In addition to these features, the visual clues for the audio waveform also help in a way.

subtitld screenshot 1

Overall, you can do many things and use it professionally as well, if you are someone who transcribes videos and want to edit the video in one go.

Recommended Read:

Installing Subtitld in Linux

While it is also available for Windows, you can easily install it on Linux using the snap package. You will not find any binary packages or Flatpak available, but you should be able to install it on any Linux distribution using snap on Linux.

You can find the source code on GitLab if you want to explore.

Closing Thoughts

With fine-grained settings available to sync or add subtitles for a video, I just tested a few basic functions to import, export, add or remove subtitles.

The auto-transcribe feature is still something in beta (as of publishing this), but the user interface could use some improvements. For instance, when I hover over the buttons inside the editor, it does not tell me what it does.

Overall, it is a useful tool to have available on Linux. What do you think about it? Please don’t hesitate to let me know your thoughts in the comments down below.

About the author
Ankush Das

Ankush Das

A passionate technophile who also happens to be a Computer Science graduate. You will usually see cats dancing to the beautiful tunes sung by him.

Become a Better Linux User

With the FOSS Weekly Newsletter, you learn useful Linux tips, discover applications, explore new distros and stay updated with the latest from Linux world

It's FOSS

Great! You’ve successfully signed up.

Welcome back! You've successfully signed in.

You've successfully subscribed to It's FOSS.

Success! Check your email for magic link to sign-in.

Success! Your billing info has been updated.

Your billing was not updated.