How to Add Soft Subtitles to Your iTunes Movies

These are instructions on how to add multiple subtitle tracks to your iTunes movies and videos using iSubtitle.

By not hardcoding the subtitle into the video you add the ability to select from different languages during playback on your iPhone, iPod, Apple TV, QuickTime or iTunes.

Step One
Download iSubtitle from here and save it to your desktop.


Double click the downloaded dmg file to mount it.


Drag the iSubtitle application into your Applications folder to install it.


Step Two
Double click the iSubtitle icon in your Applications folder to launch the program.


Step Three
Select Open from the File Menu.


Step Four
Select the movie or video you would like to add subtitles to, then click the Open button.


Step Five
A video player will appear with your movie already loaded.


There should be a Settings side panel to the right of the video. If its not visible click the Settings button on the toolbar to open it.


Step Six
To add subtitles to the video click the + button at the bottom of the Subtitles tab in the Settings side panel.


Select the subtitle file you would like to add then click the Open button.


Notice a new subtitle track is added to the list. iSubtitle will try to guess the language and encoding of the subtitle file. Make sure these are correct then play a bit of the movie to see if the subtitles are in sync with the dialog.




If the sync is off you can use the Time Offset up and down buttons to correct it.


Step Seven
You can use the + button to specify additional subtitle tracks in different languages. Sometimes iSubtitle might not be able to detect the language or encoding. For example, middle eastern languages occasionally pose a problem.

Click the + button to add another subtitle.


Select the subtitle file then click the Open button.


Notice the subtitle is detected as French. In this case the subtitle is actually in Hebrew so lets change the language dropdown to Hebrew.


When we preview the clip the text is still displayed as garble even though the language is set correctly.


If iSubtitle is still not able to guess the encoding with correct language set, try looking through the encoding dropdown to find the proper setting. Its okay if it's not there because thankfully iSubtitle includes a much more extensive list of encodings in the Preferences.


Step Eight
Click to select Preferences from the iSubtitle Menu.


Click to select the Encodings tab.


Scan through the extensive list of encodings and select the ones you frequently use then close the Preferences window.


Step Nine
Now return to the garbled subtitle track and select the correct encoding from the dropdown. In our example the correct encoding was Hebrew (ISO 8859-8).


Now notice the preview shows the correctly formatted text.


Step Ten
If your video is already in an iTunes compatible format simply select Save from the File Menu.


Name the file and make sure Save as a Self-Contained Movie is selected.


It won't take long to add the subtitles to the video.


Step Eleven
If your video is not in an iTunes compatible format iSubtitle offers converting capabilities as well. Click the Export button on the toolbar then select the device you wish to convert formats for from the popup menu.




Step Twelve
Drag the saved file into iTunes to add it to your library.


Step Thirteen
Notice while playing the video you now have a little text bubble in the controller. Click this bubble to enable subtitles and select the language of your choice.











*iSubtitle is developed by bitfield. If you try it and like it, iSubtitle can be purchased for $19.