Subtitle Edit

the subtitle editor :)

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Chapters

Edit the chapter marks of the loaded video: add them at the video position, import them from the video or a file, export them, and write them back into the video file.

• Menu: Video → More → Chapters…
• Shortcut: Configurable

Chapters belong to the video, not to the subtitle, so a video must be loaded. Chapters are drawn on the audio visualizer as labelled marks, which makes them useful as landmarks while subtitling even if you never write them back to the video.

How to Use

1. Open the video, then Video → More → Chapters…
2. Add chapters at the video position, or import the ones the video already has
3. Rename a chapter and adjust its start time in the Selected chapter panel on the right
4. Click OK to keep the list

The list shows #, Start time and Chapter title, sorted by time. Go to moves the video to the selected chapter.

Adding and Editing

• Add chapter at video position — Adds a chapter where the video is right now, named Chapter n
• Add chapter — Adds a chapter without using the video position
• Delete / Clear — Remove the selected chapter, or all of them (both ask first)
• Selected chapter — Edit the title and the start time; a button sets the start time to the current video position

The waveform’s right-click menu has Toggle chapter at video position, which adds a chapter at the cursor, or removes the one already there — the quickest way to mark chapters while listening.

Import

• Import from video — Reads the chapters stored in the loaded video file (MP4 stores them in two different ways, and both are read)
• Import from file… — Reads Matroska chapter XML, ffmpeg metadata (.ffmeta), OGM (.txt) and .ini chapter files. Anything Subtitle Edit can open as a subtitle also works, so a plain subtitle file can be turned into chapters

Both replace the current list.

Export

Export to file… writes the list in one of four formats — the picker decides the writer, not the extension, because two of them are plain .txt:

Format	Extension
Matroska chapters XML	.xml
ffmpeg metadata	.ffmeta
OGM chapters	.txt
YouTube chapters	.txt

The YouTube form is the timestamped list you paste into a video description.

Adjust Times

• Shift all times — Move every chapter forward or backward by the same amount
• Change frame rate — Scale every chapter time from one frame rate to another

Write to Video

Write to video… writes the chapters into a copy of the video file. Nothing is re-encoded, so it is quick and lossless. Only MP4 and Matroska can carry chapters; for anything else the button reports that. Pick the output file name — ffmpeg cannot write over the file it is reading, so the suggestion is a sibling file.

Where Chapters Are Stored

Chapters you edit are saved next to Subtitle Edit’s other per-video data (a .chapters.xml sidecar in the Chapters folder of Subtitle Edit’s data folder, named after a hash of the video file), not inside the video. The sidecar is plain Matroska chapter XML, so it can be handed straight to mkvmerge.

When a video is opened, the sidecar wins over the chapters inside the container: it only exists because you changed something, and re-reading the video would undo that work. Use Import from video to deliberately go back to what the file itself carries.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Key	Action
Escape	Close / Cancel
Delete	Delete the selected chapter (in the list)