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Suggestion: Change the default duration when inserting a new subtitle line

Open Beginner friendly
#15,331 2 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
2/5
Estimated time
1-3 hours
Newbie friendliness
72/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Active
Tech stack
csharp
Domain
desktop

Research direction

Search the C# codebase for the subtitle-line insertion flow and the current 2000 ms default. Change the default for newly inserted lines to 1000 ms, then verify that inserting a line uses the requested duration and run any relevant existing tests or checks.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

I would like to suggest a small change to the default duration when inserting a new subtitle line.
In Subtitle Edit 4, a newly inserted subtitle line was automatically given a duration of 1000 ms. We would then adjust the duration according to the length of the dialogue.
In Subtitle Edit 5, a newly inserted line defaults to 2000 ms. In practice, I almost always have to reduce it back to around 1000 ms.
I work extensively on subtitles for long episodes, often 2 to 2.5 hours long, so this becomes a very repetitive task. Every time I insert a new line, I have to adjust the duration from 2000 ms to 1000 ms before continuing.
For someone who works on subtitles every day, this may seem like a small detail, but over an entire long episode it means making this same adjustment hundreds of times. It becomes unnecessarily time-consuming and interrupts the workflow.
My suggestion would therefore be to change the default duration for a newly inserted subtitle line back to 1000 ms, as it was in Subtitle Edit 4.
I believe this would make the workflow more efficient, especially for users who create and time subtitles manually.
Thank you for considering this suggestion.

Dominant language
C#
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