How to get VLC to download subtitles automatically?

VLC is a great media player that can play almost any media format. When you have a video file such as, .mkv that your usual media player can’t play, simply play it with VLC and there is high chance it can play it without installing additional codec. VLC also comes with a subtitle feature where you can load the subtitle file for the video file. The thing it doesn’t do is to find and download the subtitle automatically. Wouldn’t it be perfect if VLC can download the subtitle automatically?It's possible using a single installation.

Know How...!!!

1. Download VLSub from its Github page. Extract the compressed file. You can find a “vlsub.lua” file in the folder. Here is the link: https://github.com/exebetche/vlsub/

2. Assuming that VLC is already installed in your computer, the next thing to do is to move the “vlsub.lua” file to the VLC extension folder.

Copy the file and paste it in: %ProgramFiles%\VideoLAN\VLC\lua\extensions\

3. Open the VLC and load a video. Under the View menu, you should now see a “VLSub” option.

4. In the VLSub window, you can select the subtitle language and add the title of the movie. Click the “Search by name” button to fetch all the related subtitles from OpenSubtitles.org. If you prefer, you can use the “Search by hash” button where it will calculate the hash for the video and find the subtitle that matches this hash. If you have converted the video from one format to another, or modified it, the hash method won’t work well.

5. When you found a match in the result list, highlight it and click “Download selection”. It will prompt you to select the location to download the subtitle file (the default location is the location of the currently playing video). Once that is done, you will be able to load the subtitle file in VLC.

VLSub is a useful extension that makes VLC even better. Now you can watch video without wasting time searching the Web for the correct subtitle file. Try it out and let me know if it works for you.