How to find and download movie subtitles

Do you always have closed captions turned on on your TV? Do you always turn on subtitles for your DVDs? Do you just enjoy subtitles? Or have you downloaded a movie that includes sections (or the entire thing) that isn’t in your native language? Well, a completely free little program called SubLight will help you easily find subtitles for videos on you PC!

After you’ve downloaded and installed SubLight it will give you a very nice looking window that looks similar to the Microsoft Office software. You can quickly search for the subtitles of a video file by clicking Choose and selecting the video. If nothing comes up, you can edit the criteria underneath the auto search box. One nice thing I’ve found about this program is that it shows the link a subtitle will have to a torrent release, which is nice if that is how you obtained the video.

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The View tab shows new subtitles, favorite subtitles, subtitles you have downloaded, and under statistics you get some nice pie graphs that show the “five most favorite” movies.

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Clicking the My movies tab will allow you to add a folder for Sublight to search for videos, which will let you find subtitles a little easier, but it always makes me click Search video files instead of saving them or auto searching for them each time. The Publish subtitle tab is also self explanatory, and you will only use it if you make a user account for the program.

Now for the fun stuff… The Settings tab! The first thing that shows up should be asking you what video player to play movies with. I haven’t seen any use for it yet. Sublight hasn’t shown me an option to ever actually play a movie. Another problem I had is with the Explorer integration. This may just be because I’m running 64 bit vista. The rest of the settings are easy to understand.

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Sublight requires the Microsoft .NET 2.0 Frameware and works on Windows 98 or higher.

This is the best way I’ve found to download subtitles. It’s simple, fast, and very useful for those of us who enjoy subtitles. Sublight is still in beta (until Jan 17th), but I hope it continues to evolve.