How to add subtitles to AVI video - A tutorial

Posted on February 27, 2008 at 6:27 am

Recently, I downloaded a video off the Internet that was in Hindi and needed to add English subtitles to the video so that I could share it with some friends. I checked out Windows Movie Maker, which is installed by default in Windows XP SP2 and has the ability to overlay text on video, but the feature set was very poor and it was nearly impossible to control where the subtitles showed up, for how long, and in what kind of format.

Another problem with Windows Movie Maker is that you can’t create subtitles that show up as an option in DVD players, it’s either there or not. After doing some research, I found that the best way to add subtitles to a video semi-professionally is to use a combination of programs, one that specializes in creating high-quality subtitles that match your video exactly and another program that takes a subtitle file and a video and combine them together.

So here’s a guide that will teach you how to add subtitles to videos for free and hopefully not make you completely frustrated! As a prerequisite, you should have some basic technical knowledge of computers and software.

To get started, you first need to download and install several applications. It may seem like a lot of applications, but anywhere tutorial you search for adding subtitles to videos will include most of these apps. Luckily, there is one program that combines many of the separate apps into one, thus making it a lot simpler to use.

Download and unzip Subtitle Workshop

Download and installed Auto Gordian Knot

When you install Auto Gordian Knot, you’ll notice it brings up several install wizards, each corresponding to a separate application. Just keep installing! Don’t worry, the apps are not very large and do not load when you computer starts or anything like that.

Subtitle Workshop only needs to be unzipped to run, there is no install. Just double click on the SubtiteWorkshop4 icon. This is the first application we will start with. Subtitle Workshop will allow us to add as many subtitles as we want into our video and save that file out as a separate file (our video will remain unaltered at this point).

After you open Subtitle Workshop, click on File and choose New Subtitle.

Then go to the Video menu option and choose Open. Choose your video and click Ok and you video will appear in the top section and start playing. Go ahead and move the slide bar to the location where you want your first subtitle to appear and then click on the No. 1 subtitle in the center box.

To add your subtitle, begin typing your text into the text box at the bottom. You should see it appear on the video as you type. Now when you add subtitles, you’ll see that there is a Show and Hide section visible in the above screenshot. You have to type in the exact times that you want the subtitles to appear, it does not just pick it up from the location that you are in the video.

In order to get the current frame that you are in while playing the video, look at the right side of the screen below the video. You’ll see those numbers just like they are in the Show/Hide boxes. Just take the value from the top one and add that into the Show box. For example, I want my first subtitle to come up 5 seconds into the video and last 5 seconds.

So I can either type in 00:00:05:000 into the Show box or I can get down to a very specific frame by typing moving the slide bar to the exact location (or pausing at the exact time) and then copying the value shown at the top right into my box. Then simply adjust the Duration value to however long you want the subtitles to remain on the screen! It is defaulted to one, so just change it to 5 or whatever.

Once you have put all of your subtitles in, go ahead and click on File and then Save. In the Save as type box, scroll down to SubRip (.srt) and save the file in that format.

Now close out Subtitle Workshop and open up Auto Gordian Knot. For the Input File, browse and select your video. Next, press CNTRL + F8 and you’ll see a new option appear called External Subs. Go ahead and browse and select the SRT file we just saved out.

Now choose Target quality for Output size and choose a quality that suits you. I left it at 75 percent. Next click on Advanced Settings and choose XviD or DivX for the codec. If the process does not work for one, use the other codec and try again.

Now click Add Job and then click Start to get your subtitles added on to your video!

The Log window on the left will detail out all of the processing that is going on with your file. It will also auto-load all of those other applications that it needs in order to burn your subtitles onto the video file. When you do this for the first time, you need to watch out for some license agreement that pops up and accept it otherwise it seems like the program is just stuck, when it’s really not! The program is very fast and you’ll see the Job Finished message when it’s complete.

And that’s it! As if that was very easy! Hopefully, with a little bit of playing around, you were able to get it to work. If not, start up a thread on this post and I’ll answer any comments I can! Enjoy your new subtitled video!

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18 Responses to “How to add subtitles to AVI video - A tutorial”

Louise said on : March 2nd, 2008 at 9:44 am

I used the AGK, and at the end of it, it has an error, here is the log, could you please help??? Thanks!

[2008/3/2 下午 11:41:21] AutoGK 2.45
[2008/3/2 下午 11:41:21] OS: WinXP (5.1.2600).2
[2008/3/2 下午 11:41:21] Job started.
[2008/3/2 下午 11:41:21] Input file: C:\Documents and Settings\Owner\桌面\Long\Home.avi
[2008/3/2 下午 11:41:21] Input codec: DivX
[2008/3/2 下午 11:41:21] Source duration: 3mn 44s 457ms
[2008/3/2 下午 11:41:21] Output file: C:\Documents and Settings\Owner\桌面\Long\Home_agk.avi
[2008/3/2 下午 11:41:21] Output codec: XviD
[2008/3/2 下午 11:41:21] Audio 1: 128 Kbps CBR MP3 2ch
[2008/3/2 下午 11:41:21] Subtitles: from external file: C:\Documents and Settings\Owner\桌面\Long\Home.srt
[2008/3/2 下午 11:41:21] Format: AVI
[2008/3/2 下午 11:41:21] Target quality: 75%
[2008/3/2 下午 11:41:21] Audio 1 settings: CBR MP3 with bitrate: 128Kbps
[2008/3/2 下午 11:41:21] Started encoding.
[2008/3/2 下午 11:41:21] Source resolution: 320×240
[2008/3/2 下午 11:41:21] Source fps: 29.917
[2008/3/2 下午 11:41:21] Analyzing source.
[2008/3/2 下午 11:41:56] Source has percentage of interlacing in motion areas: 0.27
[2008/3/2 下午 11:41:56] Source has percentage of telecined patterns: 0.26
[2008/3/2 下午 11:41:56] Source has percentage of progressive patterns: 99.74
[2008/3/2 下午 11:41:56] Source has percentage of interlaced patterns: 0.00
[2008/3/2 下午 11:41:56] Source is considered to be progressive.
[2008/3/2 下午 11:41:56] Output will contain 6715 frames
[2008/3/2 下午 11:41:56] Demuxing audio.
*************************************
EXCEPTION: There was an error during audio encoding.
*************************************
[2008/3/2 下午 11:42:07] Job finished. Total time: 45 seconds

matt said on : April 6th, 2008 at 2:59 am

Try starting over, you probably have your times incorrect. start from scratch and be very careful!

bobby said on : April 6th, 2008 at 12:25 pm

VirtualDub Error

Fast write stream: couldn’t open “…..” : The process cannot access the file because it is being used by an other process…

Why????
plz help

kenan said on : April 12th, 2008 at 2:06 pm

im having a little problem with this. As soon as i try to open the video the whole program (subtitle workshop 4) closes out. Is there a solution to this problem?

damaster said on : May 2nd, 2008 at 6:22 am

haha, lol. Just put the subtitle file and the .avi file in a special map. There have to be nothing in it only the movie and the subtitles. Be sure you named both files the same. Download WINAvi Video Converter and crack it and http://www.altavista.com.
Open WINAVI Video converter and press the biggest round button. This action will lead you to the next screen. There you can choose where your output directory. And the rest of the settings. Then just press convert (Downleft of the dialog.
Have some time, mostly 15/30 minutes. and ya job’s done! BTW, Subtitle workshop isn’t required but it very helpfull if the subtitles are not timed correctly.

np,
g

J L Narayanan said on : May 11th, 2008 at 2:07 am

Thanks for useful tips to add English subtitles to the video and it works out to be fine. Is their any software to create subtitles in regional languages like Hindi, Tamil,Telugu, Malayalam, etc

Angie said on : May 14th, 2008 at 11:02 am

With this program can you convert chinese subtitles into english subtitles??

Claudia said on : June 9th, 2008 at 11:18 am

I did everything as you told me and at the end it tells me the audio is not supported.

Can you tell me why?

Chinick_1 said on : June 9th, 2008 at 3:01 pm

I already downloaded a avi file and separated is the subtitles file (srt).

May I with this software integrate the srt file to the original avi file?

Thanks and regards for any advice….

dny said on : June 28th, 2008 at 12:57 am

the video does not start when i open it with subtitle workshop

Marburg said on : June 28th, 2008 at 4:14 pm

Very usefull post. Running on Vista it seemed that everything was going fine, but not processing at all!

Aborting the convertion process, an EXCEPTION message was driven to log window. A especified log file was not found(./agk_tmp/interlace.log), simply creating + renaming an empty txt file resolved the problem.

Thanks a lot!

Formula1 said on : July 10th, 2008 at 7:41 am

can i make the output file the same size as the original without loseeing Q of pictute??

Bobo said on : July 23rd, 2008 at 4:06 am

Encoding the subtitles to the video doesn’t work for me… It tells me “Unsupported audio type”. I have no idea what to do about it. Here’s the log:

====================================================
[23/07/2008 11:04:18] AutoGK 2.45
[23/07/2008 11:04:18] OS: Windows Vista (6.0.6001).2
[23/07/2008 11:04:18] Job started.
[23/07/2008 11:04:18] Input file: C:\Users\Bobo\Desktop\get_video.avi
[23/07/2008 11:04:18] Input codec: DivX 4
[23/07/2008 11:04:18] Source duration: 7mn 19s 440ms
[23/07/2008 11:04:18] Output file: C:\Users\Bobo\Desktop\get_video_agk.avi
[23/07/2008 11:04:18] Output codec: XviD
[23/07/2008 11:04:18] Audio 1: 96 Kbps MPEG-2 Audio layer 3 2ch
[23/07/2008 11:04:18] Subtitles: from external file: C:\Users\Bobo\Desktop\get_video.srt
[23/07/2008 11:04:18] Format: AVI
[23/07/2008 11:04:18] Target quality: 100%
[23/07/2008 11:04:18] Audio 1 settings: VBR MP3 with average bitrate: 128Kbps
[23/07/2008 11:04:18] Started encoding.
[23/07/2008 11:04:18] Source resolution: 320×240
[23/07/2008 11:04:18] Source fps: 25
[23/07/2008 11:04:18] Analyzing source.
[23/07/2008 11:05:00] Source is considered to be progressive.
[23/07/2008 11:05:00] Output will contain 10986 frames
[23/07/2008 11:05:00] Demuxing audio.
*************************************
EXCEPTION: Unsupported audio type.
*************************************
[23/07/2008 11:05:00] Job finished. Total time: 41 seconds
====================================================

Mason said on : July 23rd, 2008 at 9:32 am

While VideoDub was working, I received a popup notice saying “Video Compression Error: The Source Image format is not acceptable. (error code -2).

What happened? :S

Bobo said on : July 24th, 2008 at 10:33 am

I have found a better way to insert subtitles than the one described in this article.

Watch this YouTube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_O1ftKTSprw

I have tried it and it WORKS!

Cheers everyone

purushotham said on : August 10th, 2008 at 9:03 am

Thank you very much. it was succesful. GOD bless you.

Steamer said on : August 16th, 2008 at 11:01 pm

Please I hope someone can help me.

I do the proccess but there is a problem, The sound and the video are out of sync.

Somehow the Sound appears after the video.

The subtitles are there, but they are in sync with the audio, not the video.

I realize that there is a problem with the encoding of the file and I tried the first three options on “Output Audio type”

-Auto
-Original
-VBR

I’m still yet to try with CBR, but I think the same will appear.

I’m encoding video with Xvid.

PLEASE help will be appreciated it

Razvan said on : August 30th, 2008 at 4:52 pm

Hello ! Thank you so much for this tutorial. Everything worked out great for me. Good job man. Thanks for all the work that you put into this tutorial !
Watch my subtitled video here : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2VQzqNGEg0