SubViewer

Before SubViewer, subtitles were only available if they had been previously encoded, and were readble through DVD players. In time, more videos became accessible via the web, but the only language available for subtitle, was more than likely, English.

David Dolinski, author of SubViewer, thought it a good idea to create a video player, with synchronised subtitles, and offered the user subtitles in the language of the user, as well.

In 1999, Dolinski launched the first version of SubViewer, and it became a success, with millions of downloads on [1] Since then, millions of subtitles have been created by users of SubViewer, and later, some DIVX Players became compatible wih this kind of subtitle.

In 2000, Dolinski created a new version of SubViewer with a new version of subtitle (2.0) (extension file .sub) and a friend of his, named Brain, creates SubRip with a new subtitle format with an extension file '.srt'..

These 2 formats are today, the most commonly used types of subtitles in the world.

Most DIVX players are compatible with .sub or .srt subtitle files. -->SubViewer is a utility for adding and synchronizing subtitles to video content. It was created by David Dolinski in 1999, and offered for download on his personal website, [2]. A friend of David Dolinski (alias Brain) created, at the same time, software to extract subtitles from DVD named SubRip.

SubViewer became popular when support for it was included in the DivX media player. On August 28 2008, YouTube included support for SubViewer and SubRip, allowing existing videos to be retroactively subtitled.

Technical Information

The SubViewer program contains a text editor and an embedded Microsoft ActiveX Media Player to help coordinate the captions.

SubViewer uses text files with the .sub extension to describe timing and titling data. Alternate languages or intents (e.g. "signs only", "version 1.0 compatible") can be included by creating a separate .sub file for each case.

A header section, identified by [INFORMATION] tags, contains metadata and rendering instructions. Immediately following is a [SUBTITLE] section, consisting of comma-delimited time ranges (accurate to one hundredth of a second) and a caption to be displayed during each range:

00:04:35.03,00:04:38.82
Hello guys... please sit down...

00:05:00.19,00:05:03.47
M. Franklin,[br]are you crazy?

Version 2 of the file format allows line breaks of the form [br] to be entered.

SubViewer can read many other subtitle formats, like SMI (SAMI) (Microsoft), JacoSub, MicroDVD, SRT (SubRip), Sub Station Alpha and DVDSubtitle.

SubViewer can also read musics with a synchronized subtitle, like a Karaoke software.