Subtitles below the video in VLC
Videos are typically 16:9 or some thing and so are displays.
Mine is currently a Dell U3223QE, a 32" 4K display.
VLC renders subtitles on the video and I don't quite like that.
I read somewhere that MPV makes it easy to move them but I'm not feeling up to changing from VLC.
I had tried Googling earlier and had got some reddit thread where they outlined how it can be done, but I hadn't gotten it to work.
Yesterday I tried Gemini (or was it CGPT, I forget) and it listed the steps quite nicely, and what's best is that it worked.
Perhaps it was my impatience or that it wasn't laid out as a sequence of steps like Gemini did but I probably missed the part of restarting VLC the last time is why it didn't work.
Really? We need to restart it to make the change? In 2025? Really, VLC, sheesh!
I'm so disappointed... in an absolutely brilliant and free software that's been maintained so well supporting nearly all codecs over so many years. The greedy ingrate I am.
Anyway, here are the steps for the Mac version (VLC 3.0.21):
- Open preferences.
- Show all.
- Expand Video.
- Expand Filters.
- Scroll right to the bottom of the list and check the "Video cropping filter". Yes, you need to enable a filter for it to work.
- Back in the Filters list, scroll to the bottom and click "cropadd".
- Set "Pixels to padd to bottom" to 50. (Yes, it's "padd").
- Back in the Video list, click "Subtitles/OSD".
- Under Subtitles, set "Force subtitle position" to -140.
- Save.
- Quit VLC.
- Open VLC and when you're in non-full-screen mode you should see a black ribbon/bar at the bottom. You can get rid of it by unchecking the "Video cropping filter" in step 5.
- Go to full-screen mode and subtitles should be below the video.
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Last edited 11 months, 1 week ago.