App to Automatically Sync Subtitles to Videos

by Rian

As I was going through my media library, there was one thing I noticed consistently — I am more or less after the fan-made subs than the rips themselves. The official subtitles tend to miss out on the clever wordplays, crude jokes, pretty much anything that is not broadcast-friendly in both literal and financial sense. But at the same time, I also consistently notice fan-made subtitles are out of sync by 1/4 seconds or so.

ffsubsync is a freely available open source subtitle tool designed to simply align the timeframe of subtitle to that of a target video. It’s specifically written to listen for speech, irregardless of the language spoken, so it won’t erroneously match the subtitle to the background music.

I do wish the streaming services and other media storefronts would allow external subtitles in the first place. It wouldn’t be feasible for these companies to make one perfect subtitle for all, so let the community do the rest from there on. For example, many cable companies simply sell VOD with hardcoded subtitles that are illegible and do not identify the important environmental auditory cues. As much as I understand some would prefer closed captioning to be limited as possible (i.e. transcribe the dialogues only), not all cues are taken the same around the world. Ice cream truck jingle used in horror context is a great example.