Find Empty Subtitles
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One box, two choices, and each has a page of its own. A cue with no text at all is a subtitle that occupies the timeline while showing nothing — there is no reading of a file where that is right, so the report marks it an error. A cue with no letters is a line that holds something but no words: music notes standing in for a song, a bare number, three dashes. Broadcast captions use those on purpose, so the report marks them for a look rather than a fault, and the measured column shows the characters that are actually there.
Which frame rate the timings are counted in. On the format pages this is what MicroDVD needs, because it stores timing as frame numbers. On the frame rate pages it is the rate the file was timed against — the version the subtitles were made for — and the page's second box takes the rate of the video you are going to use them with. 23.976, 24, 25, 29.97, 30, 50, 59.94 and 60 are the common ones. Getting it wrong shifts the whole timeline, and on the frame rate pages it shifts it by a ratio rather than by a fixed amount.
An empty subtitle is a cue that takes up time on the timeline and holds nothing: no text at all, or nothing but spaces. This page lists every one of them, with the cue's own start and end times and the number of characters it was measured at, and hands the result back as a report rather than a file — nothing is deleted and no timecode is moved.
Empty cues come from all over. A translator deletes a line and leaves the timing block behind; a convert from another format drops a subtitle that had positioned graphics instead of text; a script generates cues for music that never got labelled. None of those are visible in a player — the cue simply passes and nothing appears — so they survive proofreading and accumulate in a season's worth of files. What they cost is a moment in the timeline that looks accounted for and is not: an automated check downstream, a duration audit or a burn-in pass, will treat that time as covered.
What this page calls empty is exactly nothing: zero characters after trimming. A cue holding a pair of music notes is not empty here, and neither is one holding a single number — those hold content and are the business of the neighbouring page, which finds subtitles with no dialogue: cues that hold something but nothing anybody says. The split matters, because the two defects are fixed differently: an empty cue can be deleted outright, while a music cue usually needs to stay and be described. Formats that store no end of their own are still accepted — LRC gives an empty cue its end from the following timestamp — so the report prints a real span rather than a point.
Examples
A cue with no text at all
Subtitles
1
00:00:01,000 --> 00:00:02,500
Where were you?
2
00:00:02,500 --> 00:00:04,000
3
00:00:04,000 --> 00:00:05,000
I was working late.
What the report finds
Cues with no words — 1 found
Severity Cues Start End Measured
Error 2 00:00:02.500 00:00:04.000 0 characters
The middle cue occupies a second and a half of the timeline with nothing in it. The report keeps the cue's own start and end, so the finding can be found in the file by timecode, and measures it at 0 characters — the cue is described, not repaired.
Whitespace is empty, music notes are not
Subtitles
1
00:00:01,000 --> 00:00:02,000
2
00:00:03,000 --> 00:00:04,000
♪ ♪
What the report finds
Cues with no words — 1 found
Severity Cues Start End Measured
Error 1 00:00:01.000 00:00:02.000 0 characters
Two cues that both look blank in an editor and are not the same thing. Three spaces trim away to nothing and are reported; the music notes are content, so this page leaves them alone. Judging both here would make this page and the page that finds subtitles with no dialogue the same page.
An LRC line with nothing after the timestamp
Subtitles
[00:05.00]
[00:09.00]And then it stopped.
What the report finds
Cues with no words — 1 found
Severity Cues Start End Measured
Error 2 00:00:05.000 00:00:09.000 0 characters
LRC stores one time per line and no end, so the reader takes the empty cue's end from the timestamp after it and the report can print a real span — 5 to 9 seconds — instead of a point. This is the case that puts LRC on this page's format list at all.
Frequently asked questions
What makes a subtitle empty on this page?
Zero characters after trimming, in every line of the cue. A cue holding only spaces, tabs or line breaks counts as empty. A cue holding a music note, a dash, a number or a single letter does not — it holds content, and the page next door is the one that asks whether content is dialogue.
Are empty subtitles actually a problem?
They are a problem for everything downstream that trusts the timeline. A cue that occupies a second and a half looks like covered time to a duration audit, a gap check or a burn-in pass, and the viewer notices the result as a subtitle that failed to appear rather than as a blank cue. Deleting them also shortens nothing, because the time belongs to no line.
Does this page delete the empty cues it finds?
No. It lists them, with timecodes and a character count, and stops there. Deleting is a separate operation, and keeping the check and the repair apart means the report you send to a client or an archive describes the file that was delivered rather than one this page already edited.
How is the character count worked out?
The visible text of the cue is measured after trimming, with any inline formatting tags removed, so a cue styled as bold around nothing still measures zero. The count is printed for every finding, which is also what separates this page from the one that reports cues with too few characters.
Which subtitle formats can be checked for empty cues?
Eleven of the twelve: SRT, WebVTT, ASS, SSA, SBV, SMI, LRC, MicroDVD, TTML, JSON and CSV. Plain text is the exception, because it has no cues at all — an empty line in a text file is just an empty line, and there is nothing to call a cue.
Why does the report call the section cues with no words rather than cues with no text?
Because the same section heading is printed for genuinely empty cues and for the ones holding only symbols, and no text would be untrue of a cue that measures three characters. Words is the honest common word for both, and the character count underneath each row says which kind of finding it is.
Can a whole batch of files be checked in one run?
Yes. Drop in as many as you like and they are read one after another, each producing its own report, and the reports come down together as a zip. Progress is shown per file and the run can be cancelled partway; nothing is uploaded at any point.