How-To

15 Best Sites to Download Subtitles for Movies and TV

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Are you looking for subtitles to improve your watching experience? Here’s a list of the 15 best places to download subtitles for movies and TV online.

Subtitles aren’t just useful for people who are hard of hearing. You can use them if you’re watching movies on the bus without disturbing your fellow passengers. They’re also a great way to help learn other languages, or even just to help you figure out what a movie character is saying when he mumbles a crucial line.

If you’re watching a movie, your file may not have any subtitles at all, or it may have a limited number of language options. The good news is that it’s possible to download subtitles for movies and TV shows that don’t come with them already.

There are a number of useful websites that can help you track down the subtitles you need. Here are some of the best sites to download subtitles for movies and TV.

OpenSubtitles has an enormous database that’s currently sitting at more than six million subtitles files. You can find subs in one hundred different languages—there are even subtitles in Breton, a language spoken in one small region of France that only has around 200,000 native speakers. If you’re looking for subtitles in more obscure languages, then OpenSubtitles is definitely the place you should look first. There’s an option to have your subtitles translated by AI if you can’t find them in the right language. You’ll need to register for this feature.

Searching for subtitles is simple; type the name of the TV show or movie you’re searching for, choose a language, and hit the search button. You’ll see a list of all available subtitles, as well as some information about the show or movie that they’re for. Some of the subtitles will include ratings from other site users, although with such a huge database, many subtitles are still unrated.

There’s also an advanced search option that allows you to search under a wide range of criteria. These include subtitle format, movie genre, file size, and frame rate, and you can even search for a specific episode number of a show. Registered members can also use the multi-search feature to search for multiple movies and shows at once.

It’s not perfect, however. This isn’t the greatest web design you will ever see, with the text appearing quite small on a desktop or laptop, and small enough to be almost unreadable on mobile. There are also a lot of ads; expect to be treated to a full-page ad before your download begins.

As you might suspect from the name of the website, this site (English Subtitles) focuses solely on subtitles in English. If you’re looking for English language subtitles, however, then this site is a great option.

It has thousands of subs to choose from, and searching is easy with a simple search bar or dedicated pages for subtitles from movies or TV shows. The home page also shows the most recent subtitles added to the site. It doesn’t have the more in-depth search options that some other sites offer, however.

There’s also a dedicated mobile version of the site so it’s not as painful searching for subtitles on your phone as it is with some of the other websites on this list.

Subscene has a decent selection of subtitles, including many subtitles in HI format. These are subtitles that are specifically designed for the hearing impaired and include additional information other than simply the dialog, such as speaker identification and sound effect descriptions. It’s possible to filter your search results to include just HI subtitles, just non-HI subtitles, or both types.

Subscene makes it easy to find high-quality subtitles by using a simple icon system. Those with a green icon are highly rated by other users on the site. Those with a gray icon are unrated. It’s an effective way to help you find the best subs with a minimum of effort.

If you’re unable to find the subtitles you want on the site, you can turn to the popular forum. This is a place for discussions on all things subtitles, but you can also put in a request for subs that you’re not able to find elsewhere.

Using a number in place of a letter should be a punishable crime (the movie Se7en, we’re looking at you here). Despite the horrific name (which is meant to read as ‘addicted’), Addic7ed is an excellent site for subtitles, with a large selection of both movies and TV shows.

Searching is made simple: there’s a drop-down to select your language and a search bar for making your searches. Addic7ed doesn’t have the range of languages that some other sites on this list can offer, but you can still choose from 18 different languages. A nice feature is that you can view subtitles before you download them and edit them if you spot any errors. You need to be a member of the site for ‘a few days’ before you’re able to do so, however. This is presumably to stop people maliciously editing subtitles incorrectly.

Addic7ed also has a forum where you can make requests for subtitles that you’re struggling to find anywhere else. If your subtitle search returns no results, there’s even a useful button to click to instantly make a request on the forum. You’ll need to register to take advantage of all of these features.

Subtitle Seeker has a good selection of subtitles for popular movies and TV shows. Downloading them is a much more challenging experience than it should be, however.

Finding the subtitles is simple enough; there are dedicated pages for TV/Web Series and Movies. There’s also a simple search bar to search for subtitles by name. The vast majority of the subtitles are in English, although you can find some in other languages, and the only format option is the most common format for subtitles: SRT downloads.

Once you’ve found your subtitles, the ‘fun’ really begins. Clicking on the download link takes you to a new website where the subs are hosted. If you try to click any of the download links on this page, however, there’s a high chance that you will instead open an ad in a new tab. You can try installing an adblocker to stop this from happening.  If you don’t use one, the best way we have found to get around this is to right-click and copy the link rather than clicking on it. Pasting this link into a new tab will start the download for your subtitles without any annoying pop-ups.

It’s a frustrating experience, but Subtitle Seeker does host a lot of good subtitles, so it may be something you’re willing to put up with.

This is another site where the name gives you a big clue as to what you’re going to get. It should come as no surprise that TVsubs is a site full of, well, TV subs.

There are subtitles for more than 3,000 different shows and the site is very popular as the on-site stats prove. There have been almost 50 million downloads of English subs and that’s not including all the subs downloaded in different languages. Finding the subs you want isn’t the easiest task; your choices are either to scroll your way through the full list of shows or to use the less-than-stellar search bar. A search for ‘Young Sheldon’ for example, returns a list of all the shows with the word ‘young’ in them. You can get around this by putting your query in quotes, but it’s certainly not intuitive.

Once you’ve found your subs, however, the experience is great. It’s quick and easy to download the subs without any frustrating pop-ups or redirections.

This is one of the rare examples on our list where the name is a little misleading. YIFY was a popular movie torrenting site until it was shut down by the Motion Picture Association of America. Whilst YIFY Subtitles may have originally been intended to host subtitles for popular YIFY torrents, it’s now a general subtitles site that focused solely on movies and has useful subs no matter where you download movies from.

The site has subtitles in more than 70 different languages, and there are links for each language so that you can just see the results for the language that you’re looking for. There are also links for a variety of movie genres, too. The easiest way to find subs for specific shows, however, is to use the search bar. The list of results includes a rating for each item; users can upvote or downvote subs depending on their quality. The rating shows the number of votes received, either positive or negative. It’s a simple way to find the best subtitles more quickly.

Downloading subtitles is quick and easy, with no pop-ups. In fact, there is no advertising anywhere on the site.

Moviesubtitles is a no-frills subtitles website that focuses solely on subtitles for movies.

It may not have as many subtitles as some of the other sites on this list but still boasts well over 100,000 different subtitles for more than 20,000 movies.

The interface is clean and simple, and it’s easy to find the movie you want using the search bar. The results also show the number of both upvotes and downvotes that a subtitle has received, making it easy to find the better subtitles without having to hunt too hard. There’s no obvious way to search for a specific language, however. The results are grouped by language, but if you just want to search for French subtitles, for example, there doesn’t seem to be a way to do so.

Downloading your subtitles is a pleasant experience, with no ads or pop-ups to navigate through.

This is the sister site to Moviesubtitles, but focused, unsurprisingly, on TV shows. Both sites look almost identical and even include links to one another directly on the homepage.

There are subtitles for almost 70,000 different TV episodes in more than 20 different languages. Bizarrely, despite both sites being virtually identical in every other respect, TVsubtitles includes a drop-down box to narrow your search by language, something that is totally missing from Moviesubtitles.  The home page has some useful sections for quickly finding the subs you need, including sections for the latest uploads and the most downloaded subtitles. These lists include national flag icons, so you don’t have to waste time clicking the links to find out what language the subtitles are in. There’s also a list of the most popular TV shows, based on the number of subtitle downloads on the site.

As with Moviesubtitles, downloading your subtitles once you’ve found them is quick and pain-free.

Whilst the name of the site makes it sound unrelated to subs, podnapisi turns out to be the Slovenian word for subtitles. It’s not a site that focuses on Slovenian language subtitles, however. The site itself is all in English, and there are subs in more than 100 different languages, with over 60,000 movies, and almost 8,000 TV shows.

Podnapisis uses global language filters to provide subs in your required language. You can turn off these filters to see all available languages, or you can add multiple languages to the filter to search for several specific languages at once. You can also override the global language filters by selecting a different language in the advanced search options. These include options to search by year, season, episode, and media type (movie or TV show). The home page shows the latest uploads to the site across all types of media, but there are also links to see just the latest movies or TV series.

Once you find your subs, you get a page packed with useful information. There are some details about the show and a list of user reports, such as whether the subtitle is the wrong episode or the wrong language. There’s even a preview of the first 15 subtitles in the file. It means you can quickly see whether the file is going to be of any use. Site users can also upvote and downvote each file so you can get a quick indication of whether other users have found the subs useful.

The site is ad-free with no frustrating pop-ups. There’s also an active forum to get help with subtitles or try to track down more elusive subs.

MySubs is a site where you can not only find subtitles for a multitude of movies and TV shows in a wide range of languages; you can also easily add to them by providing your own translations.

When you search for subtitles for a particular movie or show, there’s a link on each subtitle result to create a new translation. With one click you can start creating a new subtitles file in any language.  If a current translation is showing as in progress rather than completed, you can even click the Join Translation button to jump in and help out.

Frustratingly for a site dedicated to creating subs in multiple languages, there’s no way to filter your search by language. The only search option is the simple search bar at the top of the page. However, navigating through the results is simple; the first results page will be a list of results split into TV shows and Movies. If you select a movie, you’re taken straight to the subtitles page for that movie. If you select a TV show, you’ll then be given a list of seasons to choose from. Clicking on a season then provides a list of episodes, and clicking the appropriate episode gets you to your subtitles files.

There are no ads on the site so, on the whole, MySubs offers a satisfying user experience.

Subdl has the cleanest homepage of any of the sites in this list. It consists of just four menu links and a large search bar that is front and center.

That search bar includes a language filter option that you can set to one of more than 60 languages. You can select up to four languages at once if you’re looking for results in multiple languages. If you don’t set your language before you search, you can filter the results page by language. It makes it quick and easy to find subs in the language that you’re looking for. Once you’ve found some, clicking on the link will start the download straight away. It’s one of the fastest sites on this list for going from loading the site to your subtitles starting to download.

There are some ads on the site, however, and the occasional pop-up when you click on a link. It’s a shame, as otherwise, the whole process with Subdl feels smooth and intuitive. There’s also no community on the site so if you can’t find the subs you need on the site, you won’t be able to request them.

Many of the websites on this list have names that make it clear what they’re offering. English Subtitles for DivX Movies wins the prize for the most descriptive, if most cumbersome, title.

Unsurprisingly, this site offers English subtitles for DivX movies. In fact, you can find plenty of TV show subtitles in their vaults too, so the descriptive site name turns out to be not that accurate after all. There are links to search for subtitles by the first letter, and each letter has a healthy selection of TV shows and movies to choose from. Bizarrely, the search bar doesn’t work properly at all; all it does is take your search term and paste it into a new web search that’s limited to showing results from just this website. Your browser will probably give you a warning that this form is not secure, so it’s best to avoid using this search method.

If you’re happy to search the long-winded way, then there are a lot of subs available. All of the subtitles are in SUB format, so if you’re looking for SRT subtitles, you’ll need to look elsewhere or convert them to SRT. A site such as Subtitle Tools will allow you to do this online.

Subtitles Hub has a good collection of subs, with a wide range of files to choose from for both movies and TV shows.

Searching for subs is easy; there’s a simple search bar, but once you’ve made your search, you’ll see additional options to narrow down your results by language, year, and subtitle file format. You can even search for movies from before or after a specific year. Once you’ve found your subs, you’ll spot some useful information including the ratings from other users. There’s also an option to report the file if you think the subs are corrupted, not synchronous, in the wrong language, or simply for the wrong movie.

There’s a dedicated section of the website where you can submit a request for subs if you can’t find them on the site. You don’t need to register, simply fill in the online form and add your email, and you’ll be notified when the subs become available.

All of which would make Subtitles Hub a near-perfect subtitles site but for one major problem: it’s riddled with pop-up ads, and almost every link you click redirects you somewhere else. It’s incredibly frustrating as otherwise, the site is very useful.

Downsub is a lot different from any of the sites we’ve looked at so far. That’s because rather than hosting subtitle files that have already been created, it allows you to download subtitles directly from videos hosted on popular video-sharing platforms such as YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion, and more.

The process is remarkably quick. Find the video that you want to generate the subtitles for, and copy its URL. Paste this URL into the Downsub website, and click Download. You’ll then get the option to choose between SRT or TXT subtitles. There are also additional settings that let you remove any formatting tags from the subs; this option is on by default.

Beneath the obligatory block of ads, there are also links to download the subtitles auto-translated into other languages, with a huge number of language options to choose from. Whilst auto-translated subs will never be perfect, this can be a quick and easy way to get hold of subs in less popular languages that you simply can’t find anywhere else online. Expect to deal with annoying pop-ups, however.

One major drawback of this site is that you can only download subtitles for movies and shows that you can find on video-sharing sites. There are plenty of free ad-supported movies on YouTube, however.

Find The Best Movie and TV Show Subtitles

The sites listed above should help you to find the best subtitles for the shows or movies that you’re looking for. If your search turns nothing up, you can consider requesting subs from one of the sites that offer this option.

All of the sites have a good selection of subs to choose from, with some making finding the subs you need a lot easier than others. Frustratingly, many of the sites are full of annoying ads and pop-ups, to the point where they’re almost unusable without adblocking of some kind. You might want to consider using a browser that includes adblocking features, such as the Brave browser, when visiting these sites.

Once you’ve got your subtitles, you’ll need a video player to play them on. VLC is one of the most popular options; it’s free, and adding subtitles to a video is simple to do. It’s also surprisingly powerful; there are probably some awesome things you didn’t know VLC could do.