Subtitle Editor

The Subtitle Editor opens whenever you click Edit on a sidecar pill in the Library or in Activity. It’s a single modal with three tabs — Cues, Timing, Translation — plus a separate Waveform tab documented on its own page. Edits are staged in memory; nothing touches disk until you press Save.

Opening it

The editor is reachable from anywhere a sidecar pill is shown:

Surface	How
Library → Series/Movie	Click the language pill on an episode/movie row.
Activity → History	Click Edit on a recently downloaded item.
Activity → Queue	After a translation finishes, click Edit in the toast.
Subtitle Editor → header	Cycle to the previous/next subtitle of the same item with < / >.

The Cues tab

This is the default tab when the editor opens. It’s a virtual list of every cue in the file with timestamps, duration, and the subtitle text.

Column	Effect
#	Cue index.
Start	HH:MM:SS.mmm. Click to edit inline.
End	Same.
Dur	Computed end − start, in seconds. Red when below the 80 ms minimum.
Text	Raw cue text. Multi-line cues are rendered with line breaks. Click to edit.

Inline edits commit on Enter or Tab; Escape discards. The header pill flips to “Edited” once anything is staged.

Tip

Use the search box to jump to a known line — the list virtualisation means even a 5,000-cue ASS file scrolls smoothly. Bulk-select with Shift+Click for batch operations (delete, shift-time, recolour).

The Timing tab

Coarse-grained adjustments that apply to every selected cue. Three fields, each with their own preview:

Field	Effect
Offset (ms)	Shifts every selected cue forward (positive) or backward (negative).
Speed factor	Multiplies start/end by the factor (e.g. 25/23.976 for PAL→NTSC).
Anchor	When set, the speed factor is applied around the anchor cue, so it stays at the same time and the others stretch around it.

The preview row shows the first and last cue before/after the transformation so you can sanity-check the deltas before applying.

Caution

Speed transformations are not reversible from the UI once Save writes the file — the original is preserved as a .bak sidecar (see Subtitle Backups) but you’ll have to restore it manually.

The Translation tab

If translation is enabled, this tab kicks off a job that translates the current subtitle into the target language using your active backend. The job streams progress back into the modal so you can watch it advance cue-by-cue without leaving the page.

Control	Effect
Source language	Auto-detected from the file. Override if detection is wrong.
Target language	Defaults to the series/global setting; pick another for a one-off.
Backend	Override the active backend just for this job (e.g. swap to Claude for a tricky episode).
Glossary	Toggle whether the global + series glossary is injected into the prompt.
Run	Queues the job. The modal stays open and renders progress per cue.

Note

The translated file is written next to the source file with the target language code, leaving the source untouched. Edits made in this modal still need to be saved separately if you want them to land on disk.

The Waveform tab

A full editing surface, not just a viewer — frame-accurate timing with snap-to-keyframe, scene-detect support, and Aegisub-style shortcuts. Documented in detail at Waveform Editor.

Saving and discarding

Action	Effect
Save	Writes the staged edit back to the original sidecar. The previous version is kept as .bak for the configured retention.
Save As	Writes to a new file (different language code or suffix). The original is untouched.
Discard	Drops in-memory changes. The header pill flips back to “Clean”.
Close (Esc)	If staged changes exist, prompts for confirmation.

Format support

The editor reads and writes:

Format	Read	Write	Notes
SRT	yes	yes	Plain text + basic markup.
VTT	yes	yes	Cue settings preserved.
ASS / SSA	yes	yes	Styles and override tags preserved. Karaoke is display-only on the waveform; retiming stays in Aegisub.
SUP / SUB+IDX	no	no	Image-based formats — convert to text via the OCR pipeline first.

Read-only mode

If the user running Sublarr can’t write to the source file (e.g. read-only volume, restrictive POSIX permissions), the editor still opens but the Save button is disabled. The header shows a “Read-only” badge so you don’t waste time staging edits that can’t land.