How do I enable captions in a video?

Sometimes people who like watching foreign films have questions about how to include subtitles. Immediately it is worth debunking the erroneous opinion that subtitles are a privilege of a very narrow circle of users. Indeed, at first glance it may seem that they are used extremely rarely. In fact, we often encounter the textual accompaniment of the video stream in everyday life, and sometimes even not fully realizing that this is "it".

What is hidden under the obscure word "subtitles" or, better yet, "Saba" (in slang slang)? This is the same text on the screen of the monitor or TV, appearing when watching a program or a movie with a missing or partially missing translation into the native, understandable to the viewer, the language. For sure, every Russian-speaking viewer has ever seen an English-language film at least once in his life, in which characters sometimes throw a couple of phrases in Japanese, Chinese, Thai or any other exotic language. For obvious reasons, their few replicas are not translated, but at that moment a text translation appears at the bottom of the screen. It turns out simply, effectively and, most importantly, understandable.

A slightly more special case when you have to figure out how to connect subtitles is a desire to watch the newest movie for which an audio translation has not been done yet (or not at all, or not at all).

Finally, the largest group of viewers who know best how to include subtitles are fans of anime (Japanese animation). Despite the fact that there is an anime not only with the "nose" translation, but also completely duplicated, the subtitles are still in high esteem. The thing is in the game of actors-seiyu, which by the features of their scoring "enliven" the characters, imparts uniqueness and color. It is believed that watching anime with a voice translation - means losing some of the pleasure of viewing.

Obviously, one can not do without textual accompaniment. In that case, how to turn on subtitles? In fact, there is no difficulty in this if one of the following two conditions is met: a subtitle file was downloaded along with the video file, named the same (difference in the extension), and placed in the same directory; Subtitles are in the main file (a separate stream or are part of the image).

In the first case, to display text information (translation) while watching the movie and there was no question how to include subtitles, you need to install the codec DirectVobSub in the system. In general, to prevent possible problems with the playback of multimedia files, it is recommended to install a full set of codecs, for example, K-Lite Codec pack (the link to it can be easily found on the network). An alternative way is to use universal players with built-in codecs (VLC Player). So, the codec package is installed, and in one of the folders there is a video file and subtitles. Fortunately, the developers of software players took care of the users, by default using the capturing of the subtitle file and its display on the screen.

In the popular PotPlayer (which is also the ideological successor to the kmplayer), you can not only choose, but also understand how to set up subtitles. In this wonderful player, when playing, you need to click the right mouse button to bring up the menu and select "Subtitles" - all settings are conveniently collected and sorted by function. It is possible to connect a file of sabs from an arbitrary location (the menu "open subtitles"), but it has to be done manually.

Famous Media Player Classic loads subtitle files on the same principle. If there are problems with displaying them, you need to change the type of rendering used (playback settings - output). The same goes for KMPlayer: the video settings menu is a video handler.

All this is true with respect to a single file. Sometimes subtitles (hardsubs) are part of the video stream, so they do not need to be connected (and can not be turned off).