Find Subtitles With No Dialogue
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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.
A subtitle with no dialogue is a cue that holds something but nothing anybody says: a music note, a dash, a lone number, a bracket left over from a stage direction, a row of symbols standing in for a sound effect. This page lists every cue like that, with its timecodes and the number of characters it measured, and returns a report you download — the file is not rewritten.
The line between this page and the one that finds empty cues is drawn on letters rather than on emptiness. A cue containing spaces is empty, and so is a cue containing nothing at all; a cue containing two music notes holds content and is reported here instead. That split is worth keeping because the two defects are repaired differently: an empty cue can be deleted without losing anything, while a cue that stands for a sound effect usually has to stay exactly where it is and be labelled properly, or the audience loses the information that something off-screen made a noise.
The letters counted are Unicode letters, not the ASCII range. That is not a detail: a check written against A to Z would call every line of a Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian or Greek file dialogue-free, and the mistake would be invisible in every English test file. A cue holding a single letter clears the check, digits and punctuation do not, and the character count printed next to each finding is the whole evidence for the call — a row that says 3 characters is telling you what the cue contains without making you open the file to look. The file is read, never uploaded, and a whole folder can go through the queue in one pass.
Examples
A music cue and a bare number
Subtitles
1
00:00:01,000 --> 00:00:02,000
♪ ♪
2
00:00:03,000 --> 00:00:04,000
42
3
00:00:05,000 --> 00:00:06,000
I was working late.
What the report finds
Cues with no words — 2 found
Severity Cues Start End Measured
Warning 1 00:00:01.000 00:00:02.000 3 characters
Warning 2 00:00:03.000 00:00:04.000 2 characters
Neither of the first two cues is empty; both hold content and neither holds a word. The reported rows are warnings rather than errors for exactly that reason — there is something on screen, and whether it should be there is a judgement about the file, not a defect in it.
One letter is enough to clear the check
Subtitles
1
00:00:01,000 --> 00:00:02,000
Take 42
2
00:00:03,000 --> 00:00:04,000
What the report finds
Cues with no words — 1 found
Severity Cues Start End Measured
Warning 2 00:00:03.000 00:00:04.000 0 characters
Take 42 is left alone: a single letter is a word, and the digits inside it change nothing. The cue below it is genuinely empty, so it has no letters either and does appear here — the two pages on this subcategory overlap on empty cues by arithmetic rather than by accident.
Non-Latin scripts count as letters
Subtitles
1
00:00:01,000 --> 00:00:02,000
你好
2
00:00:03,000 --> 00:00:04,000
---
What the report finds
Cues with no words — 1 found
Severity Cues Start End Measured
Warning 2 00:00:03.000 00:00:04.000 3 characters
The Chinese line is not reported; the three dashes are. Counting Unicode letters rather than the ASCII range is what keeps this page true for Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian and Greek files — and the failure it avoids is the worst one available here, because an ASCII-only check looks perfectly correct on every English fixture.
Frequently asked questions
What counts as a subtitle with no dialogue on this page?
A cue whose visible text contains no letters at all: only digits, punctuation, music notes, brackets or symbols, or a mixture of those. A single letter anywhere in any line clears the cue. Spaces alone do not make a cue dialogue-free here — a cue that is only whitespace is empty, and the page that finds empty cues is where it is reported.
How is this different from the page that finds empty subtitles?
Empty means nothing at all after trimming; no dialogue means something is there but no word of it is spoken. The measured column tells the two apart at a glance — a finding on this page always shows a character count above zero. The split exists because the repairs differ: an empty cue can go, while a music cue usually has to stay and be labelled.
Do non-Latin scripts get flagged by mistake?
No. Letters are counted as Unicode letters, so Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Arabic, Greek and Devanagari text all count as dialogue. An ASCII-only check would flag every line of those files as having no words, and the error would not show up in any English test — which is why the fixture set includes a CJK case that has to come back clean.
Are these findings errors or warnings?
Warnings. A cue holding two music notes is not a defect in the file; it may be a deliberate piece of sound description, or a placeholder somebody meant to come back to. The report says what is there and how much of it, and leaves the verdict to whoever knows what the cue is for.
Does this page change or delete anything?
No. It reads the file and produces a report, offered as a PDF to read and as a CSV to sort. Nothing is deleted, no text is rewritten, and the timecodes in the report are the file's own, so every finding can be located in an editor by searching for its start time.
Which subtitle formats does this page accept?
Eleven of the twelve: SRT, WebVTT, ASS, SSA, SBV, SMI, LRC, MicroDVD, TTML, JSON and CSV. Plain text is the exception, because a text file has no cues — every line is a line, and there is no timing to attach a finding to.
What if the file has no cues at all?
The report says so: a cue count of zero, one check run and nothing found. That is different from a file that could not be read, and different again from a file that was checked and came back clean. The three sentences stay separate, because only one of them means there is nothing to worry about.