The major disadvantage of subtitles so far has been accessibility in my opinion, at least when you take a look at watching movies on your computer. You have to know the websites and forums that provide users with subtitles and it’s more of a burden than fun to do that.

Sub Downloader [via Genbeta] could change that. This software scans various subtitle databases returning a list of subtitles for the selected movies. By default subtitles in all languages are returned which can be changed in the program’s options. If you only wanted to find and download English and French subtitles you could edit the settings accordingly.

The subtitles are automatically downloaded into the right directory. What I really like is the fact that you can dump the contents of a folder into Sub Downloader to search for subtitles for all videos at once. The tool can add two options to the right-click menu that search for subtitles when you click on that option. Again both single videos and complete folders can be submitted.

Sub Downloader is available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS.

I’am not speaking about movie downloads here – although that would be a possible application as well – but about legal purchases of movies that have been created in Asia and Scandinavia. Many of those movies have no synchronization and English subtitles which would mean that I would not be able to enjoy the movie.

I usually search subtitle databases such as Open Subtitles for the title and download the English subtitle if available. Subtitles are available in numerous languages all added by a dedicated bunch that create them for free.

The database contains more than 285000 subtitles sometimes even more than one. A search for Fight Club for instance had 258 hits for various languages and versions.

A nice feature is that you may search for subtitles in a certain language which really reduces the hits for every search that you conduct.