Subtitle Edit is a free and open source tool that does a WHOLE lot of things, but the key piece it is doing for me in my workflow is transcribing audio to text so that I can get SRT transcripts with very little editing required. The accuracy on this has been amazing in the edits I have done so far. 100% accuracy, no edits required by me after the tool runs on my edited video.

My transcription steps (version 4.0.15)

Here are the steps I use in Subtitle Edit 4.0 that have worked well for me.

1. Generate an MP4 file of my edited video, fully finished and ready for transcription.
2. Launch Subtitle Edit.
3. From the menu, select Video > Open video file
4. Find and select my MP4 file
5. From the menu, select Video > Audio to text (Whisper)
   • There is also a Vosk/Kaldi option that I haven’t tried, but Whisper has been so good I’m not changing!
6. My audio to text configuration:
   • Engine: Purfview’s Faster-Whisper-XXL
   • Language: English
   • Model: medium.en (1.5 GB)
   • Auto adjust timings: True
   • Use post-processing: True
     • Click the Settings link to set post-processing settings. I have “Merge short lines”, “Break/split long lines”, and “Fix short duration” enabled.

The interface won’t win any awards, but it works great. There is a lot of functionality built into this tool that I’m not even using and it makes the interface a little busy so it took some digging for me to find the right buttons to click. For the most part, I left things on the default settings and everything worked out really well.

The installation doesn’t come with all the tools, though. For example, as you make choices on your engine and model the tool begins asking you to download dependent packages. I actually liked this because it meant that the installation wasn’t a huge bloated thing at the beginning, but slowly adds in only the pieces you actually need.

In terms of activity, you can watch the GitHub repo for new releases.

All in all, great tool, you should add it into your flow!

Updated steps for 5.0.0 Beta release

It’s been a long time since I’ve checked in with Subtitle Edit, but at a reader’s request I took a look at the latest Beta release available on 2026-05-16 (-beta27) and figured out the sequence that matches with the previous steps.

1. Generate an MP4 file of my edited video, fully finished and ready for transcription.
2. Launch Subtitle Edit.
3. From the menu, select Video > Open video
4. Find and select my MP4 file
5. From the menu, select Video > Speech to text
6. My speech to text configuration:
   • Engine: Purfview Faster Whisper XXL (~1.4 GB)
   • Language: English
   • Model: medium.en (1.5 GB)
   • Post processing: Checked ✅
   • Click the settings icon (⚙️) to set post-processing settings. I have “Adjust timings”, “Merge short lines”, “Break/split long lines”, and “Fix short duration” enabled.