Clean Subtitle Files
Strip [sound effects], speaker labels, formatting tags and overlapping cues from SRT/VTT/ASS files in your browser. Free and private.
SDH subtitles carry annotations — [DOOR SLAMS], (SIGHS), ♪ lyrics ♪, JOHN: speaker labels — that hearing viewers often want gone. Downloaded files also accumulate junk: styling tags aimed at some other player, overlapping cue times, empty cues. Subtitle Doctor applies the cleanups you select, reports exactly what changed (cues modified, cues dropped, overlaps clamped), and renumbers the result. Each cleanup is a checkbox, so you can strip sound effects while keeping speaker names, or vice versa.
Worth knowing
- Bracketed [effects] and (parentheticals) are removed as whole segments; a cue left empty by cleanup is dropped and the file renumbered.
- Speaker detection targets label-style prefixes — "JOHN:", "- MARY:" — and leaves ordinary sentence colons ("Here is the thing: …") alone.
- Music-note cues (♪ … ♪) are treated as SDH and removed with that option.
- Overlap fixing clamps a cue's end to just before the next cue's start — it never reorders or merges cues.
- The change report tells you how many cues were edited, dropped and de-overlapped, so bulk cleans are auditable.
FAQ
What is SDH exactly?
Subtitles for the Deaf and Hard of hearing — they include non-speech information (sound effects, music, speaker identification) in addition to dialogue. Cleaning converts SDH into standard dialogue-only subtitles.
Can it remove the "downloaded from …" spam lines some subtitle sites inject?
Tag and SDH cleanup already catches many of these when they are bracketed or styled. A dedicated ad-line filter with a maintained pattern list is planned.