To be honest, even though I can speak and understand English, sometimes it’s tough to understand what the actors or actresses are saying in a movie. For cinemas in Malaysia, there are English, Chinese and Malay subtitles being displayed simultaneously. So even if you don’t understand what the characters in the movie just said, looking at the subtitles really helps a lot.

Problem is, downloaded movies and videos don’t contain subtitles. I think one of the reason why movie rippers don’t include subtitles in video files is because you can have your own choice of subtitles language. Let’s say you only understand Arabic and don’t know a single English word but you want to watch the latest Ocean’s Thirteen movie. All you need to do is just download the Arabic subtitle which is usually smaller than 100KB in size to go with the downloaded movie.

Here’s how you find the subtitles you want and include it in the downloaded movie in step-by-step instruction.

A downloaded movie is around 600MB-700MB in size. Let’s try to search for “An Inconvenient Truth” subtitle.

1. Visit Subscene to search for the subtitle.

2. Type in the movie name; For example, An Inconvenient Truth at the search box and click Search button.
Search Movie Subtitles

3. It will display a list of available subtitles for “An Inconvenient Truth”. As you can see, it has Arabic, Chinese, Brazilian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English and many more languages subtitle.
List of Subtitle Languages

4. Click on the language that you’d like to download, type the four random characters and click the Download button.

5. Extract the downloaded archive file and you should get a .SRT file.

6. Copy the .SRT file to where your downloaded movie is located and rename it exactly the same as your movie file and retain the .SRT extension.
SRT subtitles for movie

7. Play the AVI file with your favorite media player such as Winamp or BSplayer and it will automatically include the subtitle.
Subtitle in movies

You might encounter a problem that is the subtitles are out of sync. It’s either too fast, too slow or appear in wrong places. The subtitle you downloaded may be a subtitle for a different ‘frames per second’ version of the movie. Try downloading more subtitles for your movie to see if any of them fit.

Another website that has a lot of subtitles for AVI movies is “DivX Subtitles“. I less prefer this site than Subscene because it requires registration in order to download the subtitles. But if you’ve read and implemented the BugMeNot article, you don’t need to register an account to download the subtitles.

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