How To Make Your Own Subtitles With Any Text Editor

How To Make Your Own Subtitles With Any Text Editor & Aegisub

YouTube has been pushing upgrades to the site in slow doses (in the form of a nifty, basic editor, for example). Now you can even request auto-captioning of your Youtube videos to reach a larger audience (anyone that speaks a different language, wants to learn English or experiences some kind of hearing impairment).

It’s actually not that hard to manually put subtitles into your videos. It often just takes a bit of time, but soon enough, you’ll be able to translate videos to improve accessibility (especially when subtitles in your language aren’t available on the Web), or when you just want to be funny (like some of the English-subtitled Hitler spoofs on the iPad).

Any text editor that you have will be enough to create basic subtitles. For more customized subtitles, you can check out the second section of this article. The footage in the screenshots you see here is from Elephants Dream, the first open-source generated, animated short film ever made.

Making Basic Subtitles In A Text Editor

For this article, we’ll be using the built-in Notepad text editor in Windows to make basic subtitles with no additional color or font customization. Open Notepad and save your file with the .srt extension and is in UTF-8 (especially if you’re inputting special characters)

We will go over how to create subtitles in the SubRip (.srt) format, which follows this easy-to-learn pattern:

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

1
00:00:20,000 --> 00:00:24,400
Howdy!

2
00:00:24,600 --> 00:00:27,800
Why, hello there!
What's your name?

----------------------------------------------------------

Start the first line with the number 1.
Now input the times of the subtitle/caption start and end. The 
00:00:20,000
is in hours:minutes:seconds,milliseconds format. You can usually look at the video with milliseconds in Windows Movie Maker while you have Notepad open as well.

Make sure to display both windows for easier work by pressing on both programs in the taskbar while pressing Ctrl and right-clicking on either program tab and selecting Show Windows Side By Side.
Now just place a space between every line.
Repeat the steps until you finish all the lines. Remember to save often.

After you’re done, you can view the subtitles in any major media player as long as your video and the subtitle have the same names but different file extensions of course and are located in the same folder. This is known as softsubbing, which leaves the raw video file intact.