Ever watch a foreign language film only to realize that it does not have any subtitles ? Although subtitles are available at plenty of websites on the Internet, today I am going to teach you a very quick, easy and free way to auto-insert subtitles into the videos that you watch.
For the purpose of this tutorial I will use the popular VLC player. If you’re not using VLC already then I highly recommend that you do. It’s free and plays virtually every video format that you can throw at it.
First Step. Go to this Page and download the VLsub extension. Look for the link in the right column which says ‘Download ZIP’. After downloading, extract the Zip file and you will see a VLC extension file named ‘vlsub.lua’.
Second step is to move this extension file into the VLC extensions folder. If you are using windows then this will be located at ~\ProgramFiles\VideoLAN\VLC\lua\extensions\
If you are using a Mac then you must copy the .lua file to /Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/share/lua/extensions/
If the folder doesn’t exist then simply create a new one and name it ‘extensions’.
Third step is very easy. Just open the VLC player and look under the ‘View’ menu and you will see a new entry which says ‘VLsub 0.9’. Mac users must look under the VLC>Extensions menu option.
When you play a video, just click on this option and a new box will open up. Click the ‘Search by name’ button and it will quickly fetch related subtitles. You can also enter a name manually if the video file doesn’t already contain that information.
Chose a subtitles file and click on ‘Download selection’. By default VLsub saves the subtitles file in the same location where the video is saved.
Once the file is downloaded you need to close this window and restart your movie. Bingo ! It automatically starts with subtitles. Wasn’t that easy ? Much better than going through 5 different websites full of intrusive banners ads. Now sit back and enjoy !