How Subtitles Work

• Subtitles can be included in a digital movie in two ways. The first is pre-rendered, in which the subtitles have been included with the original video as part of the video stream. These subtitles cannot be changed, as they are permanently part of the onscreen video; you will need another copy of the video to change the synchronization of these subtitles.
  
  A better subtitling method is on-the-fly, in which subtitles are displayed over the video while the movie is playing. These subtitles are calculated in real time and can be changed by the user. Movie playback software will allow you to change the timing, placement on screen and text color of the subtitles so you can read them easily and they minimally interfere with the rest of the video.
  
  

Tweaking Subtitle Playback

• Use VideoLAN (VLC) to play back movies when you need precise control over your subtitles. This free software is available for Windows, Macintosh and Linux and can play a wide variety of movie formats.
  
  Your AVI file should have another file in the same folder with a file extension of ".srt." This is the standard file extension for subtitles, and the file consists of a text file with the text to be displayed onscreen and timing indicators that tell the software exactly when to display and remove each subtitle. If the subtitles do not play automatically when you start the movie, rename the subtitle .srt file so it has the same file name (except the file extension) as the AVI file: for example, MyPlaybackMovie.avi and MyPlaybackMovie.srt.
  
  Some subtitling can be out of sync for the same duration for the entire movie; other subtitling sync issues can gradually change over the course of the movie. The best way to fix this is to use on-the-fly subtitle shifting: press the "J" key to increase the subtitle delay by 50 milliseconds, and the "H" key to decrease the subtitle delay by 50 milliseconds. Most people cannot perceive a synchronization error of under 100 to 150 milliseconds, so this shift is precise enough for perfect synchronization.
  
  

Changing Subtitle Playback

• If the subtitles are too badly corrupted to manually correct them, you can try downloading a new subtitle track for many commercially released television shows and movies. Go to OpenSubtitles.org, search for the name of the video you are watching and download a new .srt file for your video.