Movie Subtitles

This Chrome extension was the project that helped me land my first developer job. It solves a real problem I faced as a language learner: the lack of good subtitle options and smart controls on major streaming platforms.

Many streaming services only offer subtitles in a limited number of languages. This extension fills that gap by letting users upload their own subtitle files and display them over any video on platforms like Netflix, YouTube, Amazon Prime, and Twitch.

At the time, AI tools like Copilot or Cursor didn't exist—I had to figure out everything on my own, from the UI to the encoding logic. Through this process, I was able to demonstrate real programming skills and ship a working, helpful product.

As an avid language learner myself, I built this extension to solve my own frustrations. I often rewatch movies in my target languages and wanted to skip long silences, focus on dialogue, and replay specific lines without jumping back arbitrary time intervals.

The biggest frustration was on streaming platforms — if I missed a word, the only option was to jump back 10 seconds, which was often too much. I'd end up watching the same scene repeatedly just to catch a single sentence. This extension fixes that by letting you rewind to the exact beginning of the current subtitle line.

Early in development, I struggled with loading subtitle files in various languages due to encoding issues. I couldn't find any npm package that reliably detected both language and encoding, and I wasn't yet familiar with AWS or GCP.

So I created my own package: detect-file-encoding-and-language. It supports 40+ languages and encodings, and I built it specifically to power this extension. Ironically, this "side project" now gets 180,000 monthly downloads compared to the extension's 8,000 active users!