Most of the popular video players such as VLC Media Player and KM Player already support playing subtitles together with the video. However there is a restriction that the subtitle will only be displayed when the video is played. You cannot use it to play just the subtitle itself. The ability to play only subtitle can be pretty important for deaf or hearing impaired people. An example is Netflix still doesn’t offer closed captioning or subtitles for streaming movies and TV episodes even after announcing on mid 2009 which may take them a year to implement it. Last year The National Association of the Deaf has sued Netflix for failing to provide closed-captioning on most of its streaming content.
Other than just crossing your fingers and waiting for Netflix to provide closed-captioning and subtitles, you can actually use a subtitle player to just play the subtitles which can be easily downloaded for free. There are a few free subtitle players which you can find and download from Softpedia and to make things easier for you, I have tested all of them and found that Greenfish Subtitle Player is the best.
A subtitle player software is actually a very simple and straight forward program. It simply overlays on top of other programs and plays the selected SRT subtitle file. Additional useful features such as pause, fast forward and rewind for manual synchronization, resize and changing the font size of the subtitle would be a bonus.
DVD Subtitle Player 1.0 lacks of pause, fast forward and rewind button.
JustSubsPlayer 1.0 crashed when I tried to load Steve Jobs Stanford Commencement Speech 2005.en.srt
Subtitle Player 1.1 by ANK wasn’t able to load Steve Jobs Stanford Commencement Speech_2005.en.srt and there is no way to resize the overlay or change the font size.
SRT – Subtitle Player 1.0.0.1 by Charlenger requires Java, lacks of fast forward and rewind button, don’t support resize of font and window.
As for Greenfish Subtitle Player 1.1, you can play, pause, rewind, fast forward, jump to certain timeframe from the sliding bar, and resizing the program to increase or decrease the subtitle font size. The only requirement is your computer must have Microsoft .NET Framework 4 installed.
Download Greenfish Subtitle Player
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