How To Search For and Add Subtitles To Movies

It is actually pretty tough to find good quality subtitles for movies over the Internet. Normally, you’d find ones with bad grammar, horribly synced dialogues and crazy credit lines (that go like, “Made By H@Xx0R”). So it becomes really tough to filter the good from the bad, and that’s exactly where Sublight comes in.

To put it simply, Sublight searches for and downloads subtitles for movies. At a deeper level though, I believe it’s a tool that self-righteous movie every lover would want. Let’s get started with Sublight.

First, you need to download and install Sublight. You can do that from here. You will also need .NET Framework 2.0, so make sure you have that (or higher) on your computer.

Once you’ve downloaded Sublight, fire it up and take a minute to familiarize yourself with the interface. On the main screen itself, you’ll be able to do all the searching you need. You have two ways by which you can go about searching for subtitles.

Search By Video File

Probably the easiest way to perform a subtitle search, you browse to your file and Sublight searches for subtitles based on parameters like the name and length of the video. All that you have to do is click on the little button labelled Choose and browse to your video file from the window that pops up. Sublight will then do a bit of its magic and suggest a Title, and the Year the movie was made. Thereafter, all you need to do is click on the Search Subtitles button to scour the Internet for matching subtitles. In the list of matches, double click on the file you need (the download starts automatically) and pop that box of popcorn for your movie marathon.

Manual Search

The other way to go about adding subtitles to movies using Sublight is the manual search. Instead of browsing to the file, enter some keywords (generally the title of the movie) in the second box and click Suggest. This will bring up a list of possible matches for the title. Select one, and click on Search Subtitles to get your fix of subtitles.

Context Menu Integration

All this stuff about Sublight is good, but what makes it really great is the fact that it can be integrated into your context menu for easy access. You don’t need to fire up the app every time you need to get a subtitle. With the app open, click on Settings. Then click on “Explorer Integration” in the left pane. On the right side of the screen, check “Open With Sublight Mini” and click “Save and Apply Changes” at the top of the screen.

From now on, you can directly right-click a video and select Find Subtitles from the context menu to look-up subtitles for your movies.

Subtitles can really take your movie viewing experience to a higher level and Sublight makes that process a lot more streamlined with the easy functionality it provides. Be sure to drop a comment in case you have any doubts about its usage.