Watching foreign films is hard enough without anyone breaking out into a dialect or using technical slang. If you want to understand what’s being said, you either have to turn up your speakers (your neighbors won’t like that), or find yourself some decent subtitles.

With videos on your computer, you can add subtitles yourself, even if they aren’t available by default. We’ve already told you how to add subtitles to a movie or TV series, with a software overlay or by burning it in the video, but we never quite told you which are the best subtitle sites to get those subtitles.

Sure, a Google search will yield some results and almost always works. But it’s better to have a source you can thoroughly rely on, to provide quality, diverse and multilingual subtitles. For your reference, below are some of the most exceptional subtitle sites.

Know Your Subtitles

But first, here are two things you need to know about subtitles.

Subtitles can exist in a lot of different file formats. The most common nowadays is SRT, a text file with special time tags. Most software will play all popular subtitle formats, unless specified otherwise.

For one specific movie or show episode, there can exist multiple subtitles. Not all of these will work. Different releases will sometimes skip the flashbacks, or include the introduction. The presence of these, or absence thereof, will upset the whole timing. Put down the (release) name of your video, and use it to find a suitable match.

Subscene

From all the best subtitle sites over the web, Subscene stands out. Use it once, and you’ll be hooked. Aside from looking great, it has an incredibly user-friendly and reliable interface, and offers pretty much all the subtitles you need.

Subtitles are grouped by movies or show seasons. You don’t search for subtitles, but for those pages. Once you’re there, you can scan the page or use a simple (Ctrl+F) to find what you need. Languages can be chosen by specifying a language filter and selecting up to three preferred languages. The filter will stay into account during the rest of this and future visits of the site.

OpenSubtitles

In many respects, OpenSubtitles is similar to Subscene. Once again, you’ve got a large multilingual database of subtitles, which are grouped by movie and TV series. There are a few different accents that differentiate OpenSubtitles.

The languages are specified during search, or not at all, and the site has an overall less intuitive interface. On the other hand, OpenSubtitles has a slightly bigger offering of subtitles.

You should give both a try and see which feels like the best subtitle site. Both are undeniably on equal grounds, offering large quantities of subtitles in an incredible amount of languages.

Subtitles.Images.O2.CZ

I’ve got a love-hate affair with this site, as should you. I think I can safely say that subtiles.images.o2.cz has one of the least user friendly sites I’ve ever encountered. In that respect, this site is complete garbage. So, heavens, why has it been featured as one of the top three subtitle sites?

As bad as the interface is, the jaw dropping offer of subtitles is even better. Whenever you can’t find a subtitle file elsewhere, you better head to subtitles.images.o2.cz. It won’t be a nice trip, but it’s the only place that has those hard to find subtitles. You name it, this site has it. You just need to find it.

The reason behind this terrible interface is that they use a badly customized Google search to search the site. Be sure to include the language and – if possible – release of the movie in the query, because the results aren’t mighty specific.

What site do you use, and why? Do you think you will switch having tried these alternatives? Tell us all about it in the comments section below.