SubViewer is a utility for adding and synchronizing subtitle

Subtitle (captioning)

Subtitles are textual versions of the dialog in films and television programs, usually displayed at the bottom of the screen. They can either be a form of written translation of a dialog in a foreign language, or a written rendering of the dialog in the same language, with or without added...

s to video content. It was created by David Dolinski in 1999, and offered for download on his personal website, http://www.dado.be. A friend of David Dolinski (alias Brain) created, at the same time, software to extract subtitles from DVD named SubRip

SubRip

SubRip is a software program for Windows which "rips" subtitles and their timings from video. It is free software, released under the GNU GPL...

.

SubViewer became popular when support for it was included in the DivX

DivX

DivX is a brand name of products created by DivX, Inc. , including the DivX Codec which has become popular due to its ability to compress lengthy video segments into small sizes while maintaining relatively high visual quality.There are two DivX codecs; the regular MPEG-4 Part 2 DivX codec and the...

 media player. On August 28 2008, YouTube

YouTube

YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005, on which users can upload, view and share videos....

 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 file

Text file

A text file is a kind of computer file that is structured as a sequence of lines of electronic text. A text file exists within a computer file system...

s 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

Newline

In computing, a newline, also known as a line break or end-of-line marker, is a special character or sequence of characters signifying the end of a line of text. The name comes from the fact that the next character after the newline will appear on a new line—that is, on the next line below the...

 of the form [br] to be entered.

SubViewer can read many other subtitle formats, like SMI (SAMI) (Microsoft), JacoSub, MicroDVD, SRT (SubRip

SubRip

SubRip is a software program for Windows which "rips" subtitles and their timings from video. It is free software, released under the GNU GPL...

), Sub Station Alpha and DVDSubtitle.

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