Sign inStart creating

Subtitles — language, colour and size

Pick from up to 30 languages and set the colour, size and background. It is remembered.

Open it →

Press CC under the player.

### Language

Every language the title actually has a track in, listed in its own name — 日本語 rather than "Japanese", because that is what you scan for.

Tracks come from three places and you cannot tell them apart, which is deliberate:

  • The original language, from the film's own dialogue.
  • A translated language, produced as a by-product of dubbing. Translating for a dub gives you the subtitles for free.
  • A hand-authored track, typed by the creator in a language with no dub at all.

Only languages with real cues are listed. Offering thirty entries where twenty-eight are empty is worse than offering two — you pick one, get nothing, and conclude the player is broken.

### Colour

White and yellow lead, because that is what broadcast has used for decades and what most people expect. There are four more, because a fixed colour is an accessibility failure: yellow over a bright scene is invisible, and viewers with colour vision differences have real preferences.

Every colour is drawn with a contrasting outline. That is not decoration. A caption with no outline vanishes the instant the frame behind it matches its fill — white text on snow, yellow on sand — and films are not shot to accommodate subtitles.

A live sample sits under the controls, over a gradient that runs dark to light, so you can see how a colour holds up before committing to it.

### Size and background

Four sizes, and four backgrounds: none, drop shadow, a light box or a solid one. Shadow is the default — readable over almost anything without covering the picture.

### It is remembered

Your choice is stored in the browser immediately and, if you are signed in, on your account so it follows you to another device. It applies from the first frame rather than correcting itself a moment after the film starts.

If a title has no track in your usual language, the menu shows Off rather than a selection that silently renders nothing.

### Right-to-left languages

Arabic, Urdu and Persian render right-to-left with an appropriate font. This is not cosmetic: a caption layer that assumes left-to-right renders Arabic with its punctuation on the wrong end and its clauses reordered, which looks like a font bug and is actually unreadable.

Did this answer your question?

Related

All help articlesAsk the community