So, you’ve got a movie on your computer that you want to see. You’ve went out of your way to get subtitles for it, for whatever reason, but when you try to play it you notice that the subtitles are out of sync with the speech in the movie. This might ruin the whole evening, especially if the movie is in language you don’t understand and you really need the subtitles. Well, do not fear, we’ll show you just how to get those subtitles in sync in no time.

The first thing you must do is download a program called SubSync and install it on your computer. It’s a small program and the installation should be straight forward, just unpack it and run the setup file. When you’ve installed it, you’re ready to get started. This is what you’ll see when you start the program:

When you first open the program you’ll notice that there’s a lot of different buttons, but we will only be using a few of them. Begin by opening the movie file (”media”) and the corresponding subtitle file. The movie will be loaded into the player and you’ll be able to watch it with the playback controls. When you’ve opened both files, click Edit subtitles.

In this window, you’ll simply select the first line and press CTRL + F5. This will mark the first line of the subtitles. Then scroll down to the bottom and select the bottom line, and press CTRL + F6. Now we’re done with this window, so switch to the main window (leaving the subtitle window open). What you now need to do is start the movie and wait for the first line of speech. When that happens, you press the button labeled “Blue” in the bottom right of the window. You then fast forward to the ending of the movie and press the “Green” button when the last line of speech comes on.

Don’t worry if you don’t get it just right at first, you can simply rewind and press the buttons again to get it perfect. When you’ve pressed these two buttons, the program will now how to scale the time in the subtitle file accordingly. What you then do is press the “Adjust” button all the way down in the right corner. You’ll be asked where to save the new, and correct subtitle file.

So this is how easy it actually is to re-sync subtitles to a movie. The key here is the excellent software, without it you’ll be forced to go through the whole subtitle file line by line and change the timing. Not a pleasant idea, right?