Sublight

Searching for subtitles for your favorite movies and TV series can become a tedious task, which usually implies different searches in different popular subtitles sites.

Sublight aggregates your searches in one elegant interface, looking for your subtitles in all the most popular sites at once.

All you need to do is to key in your movie or TV series name and click Enter. Provided that subtitles exist for it, you’ll be shown a list with all the options found. You can select a default subtitle language for all your searches or select a different one for every search. Whenever extra information is available at the original site, Sublight will also display it for you, such as when the subtitle file includes cues for hearing impaired persons, the number of downloads, the rating, the date it was submitted, or the publisher.

When searching for TV series, you can look for subtitles for a complete season or for specific episodes or years. Alternatively, you can drag and drop the video file itself onto a box in the top left corner of the main interface and let Sublight identify the movie or episode and perform the search for you. The program comes with a built-in video player to help you identify the right file.

Regrettably, all subtitle files look the same, and choosing the right one just by comparing the file names is not a very reliable method. (It is not the first time that I download four different files with slightly different file names – for the sake of comparison – just to end up with four copies of the same set of subtitles.) It is a pity that the program won’t let you preview the contents of the subtitle file so that we can check its quality beforehand.

Locating and downloading subtitles using Sublight is completely free, though for a ridiculously low subscription price you can go Premium and add batch download, subtitles publishing, access to more external databases, and the possibility of monitoring folders to the package. If you wish to get rid of the ads that split its main interface in two, you can do it for a price and buy up to 1,000 subtitle files per year instead of getting them for free. Either way, movie and TV fans will surely like the way Sublight turns an otherwise tedious task into a simple and gratifying one.