Subtitles on a TV from USB: A Checklist That Works Across TV Brands

What your TV is telling you

A TV's media player gives very little feedback, so the symptom is the main clue. Note which of these you see before changing anything.

• The video plays, but the subtitle menu has no entry or is greyed out. The TV did not find or did not accept the subtitle file.
• A subtitle entry exists, but nothing appears on screen. Subtitles may be switched off, or the TV accepted the file but can't parse its contents.
• Subtitles appear with boxes, question marks or wrong accented letters. That is a character encoding mismatch, not a missing file.
• Subtitles work for one episode and not the next. Compare the two names character by character; one usually differs.
• The video itself refuses to play or plays without sound. That is a codec problem, and fixing the subtitle file won't help.

How a TV finds a subtitle file on a USB stick

TV players are much stricter than desktop players such as VLC. They do not let you browse to a subtitle file; they look for one automatically when you open the video, and the rule they apply is simple: same folder, same name. LG's support article, for example, starts its troubleshooting from the case where the video file and subtitle file share the same name, and treats anything else as a naming fault.

In practice that means:

• The base name must match exactly, including spaces, hyphens, dots and capital letters. Holiday 2024.mp4 needs Holiday 2024.srt, not holiday 2024.srt or Holiday_2024.srt.
• Both files must sit in the same folder. A subtitle in a Subs subfolder is invisible to most TV players.
• The extension should be the plain one for the format, such as .srt. Owners in TV forums also report that a lowercase .srt is picked up where .SRT is not, and that moving files out of the top level of the stick into a folder helps on some models; these are community reports rather than manufacturer rules, but both cost nothing to try.
• Language suffixes such as Holiday 2024.en.srt are understood by some players and not others. On a TV, start with the bare name and add a suffix only if you need several languages and your model handles them.

The wider conventions for naming sidecar files, including language and forced tags for media servers, are covered in subtitle file naming.

Which subtitle formats each TV brand lists

Manufacturers publish their supported formats per model range, and the lists differ. These are the ones published on official support pages; check your own model's manual, because older and cheaper models often support fewer.

LG, external files

smi, srt, sub (MicroDVD and SubViewer 1.0/2.0), ass, ssa, txt (TMPlayer), psb (PowerDivX) and dcs, according to LG's USB subtitle support article

LG, inside the video

SSA, ASS and SRT tracks in MKV files, and Timed Text in MP4 files

LG, size limits

Video files up to 30 GB for HD and 4 GB for SD; USB devices up to 32 GB; external storage up to 1 TB

Sony, external files

SRT, IdxSub (.idx), PSB, SMI/SAMI and SSA/ASS for USB playback, per the External subtitles page of a current BRAVIA Help Guide

Samsung

Each model's e-manual has a supported external subtitles section; Samsung does not publish one general rule page, so check the e-manual for your model

Philips, TCL, Hisense and others

Formats vary by platform (many run Google TV or a manufacturer system); the user manual for the exact model is the only reliable list

SRT is the one format that appears on every list above, so if you have a choice, convert to SRT. A styled ASS file can be turned into plain SRT with the free ASS to SRT converter, which keeps the text and timing and drops the styling the TV may not render anyway.

Encoding: why LG says ANSI while others expect UTF-8

Encoding is where TV advice conflicts. LG's support article tells owners whose correctly named subtitle still fails to open the file in Windows Notepad and save it with ANSI encoding. ANSI in Notepad means the computer's legacy Windows code page, for Western European languages usually Windows-1252. Many other TVs, and most modern software, expect UTF-8.

Neither choice is universally right, so work from the language of your subtitles:

• English and Western European languages. If accented letters break or the file is ignored on an LG or another older TV, try LG's ANSI method on a copy of the file.
• Greek, Cyrillic, Turkish, Polish and other Central European languages. ANSI only works if the file is saved in the matching Windows code page and the TV is set to the same character set. Many TVs have a subtitle character set or language setting in the subtitle options; set it to match.
• Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi, Chinese, Japanese and Korean. A Western ANSI code page cannot store these scripts at all. Use UTF-8, and if the TV can't read UTF-8, burning the subtitles in (below) is the dependable route.

If a downloaded file was saved in an older code page and shows as garbled text, the free SRT encoding converter previews it under the detected encoding, lets you pick the right one (Windows-1250, 1251, 1256, Shift_JIS, GBK and others) and saves it as UTF-8, with or without a byte order mark. It does not write ANSI files; for that, use Notepad's Save As as LG describes.

Step-by-step: getting a subtitle file to show on the TV

1. On a computer, turn on visible file extensions and check that the subtitle really ends in .srt and not .srt.txt.
2. Rename the subtitle so its name, minus the extension, is identical to the video's. Copy and paste the video's name rather than retyping it.
3. Put both files in the same folder on the stick, preferably a folder rather than the top level.
4. Open the subtitle in a plain text editor and check the first cue looks like 1, a timestamp line with an arrow, then text. A file that starts with WEBVTT is a VTT file; most TVs want SRT, so convert it.
5. Safely eject the stick, plug it into the TV and open the video from the TV's media player, not from a separate app.
6. During playback, open the options or subtitle menu and switch subtitles on. Some TVs remember the off setting from the last video.
7. If text appears garbled, change the subtitle character set or language in the same menu, or re-save the file with the other encoding as described above.
8. If nothing works, try the same files on another device, such as VLC on a computer. If they work there, the TV's player is the limit, and burning the subtitles in is the next step.

The generic SRT checks that apply to any player, such as malformed timestamps or missing blank lines, are in SRT file not working.

Subtitles inside MKV files

Some downloaded videos carry subtitles inside the MKV file instead of beside it. LG lists SSA, ASS and SRT tracks in MKV as supported, but many MKV files from Blu-ray rips contain PGS tracks, which are images of text rather than text. A TV that doesn't decode PGS shows nothing, even though a desktop player shows the subtitles fine. The full diagnosis for embedded tracks is in MKV subtitles not showing.

When the track is text, you can pull it out as a sidecar file the TV can find. The free extract subtitles tool lists the tracks inside an MKV, MP4 or WebM in your browser and saves a chosen text track as SRT. Name the SRT after the video and copy both to the stick. Image tracks such as PGS are listed but can't be converted to text, because that needs OCR.

Two examples

When the TV won't cooperate: burn the subtitles in

Burned-in (open) subtitles are drawn into the video frames, so the TV has nothing to parse, no name to match and no encoding to guess. The trade-off is that viewers can't switch them off or change their size, and you need a separate file for each language.

The free subtitle editor does this in the browser on a computer: open the video (MP4, MOV, M4V, WebM or MKV), import the SRT or VTT, choose a style (fonts, colours, a background box for legibility on bright scenes), then render an MP4 with the subtitles burned in. The video is processed on your device and isn't uploaded. Rendering needs Chrome or Edge 94 or later, Safari 16.4 or later, or Firefox 130 or later on a computer; the editor reads imported SRT and VTT files as UTF-8, so convert old code-page files first. The output is an MP4, usually H.264, which TV media players widely support.

What you can't fix from the file side

• A video codec the TV doesn't decode. LG notes that a TV supports fewer codecs than a computer, and that subtitles may fail if the video's codec isn't supported. Re-encoding to MP4 is the fix, not renaming the subtitle.
• Image-based tracks (PGS, VobSub) on a TV that doesn't render them. Burn them in with a desktop tool, or find a text version.
• Subtitle size, font and position. TV players control how sidecar subtitles look, and most offer few or no options.
• Playback over a home network. LG notes that SMI subtitles are limited in DLNA mode, and network players vary more than USB playback.

No subtitles yet?

For home videos, talks or foreign-language clips with no subtitle file, the subtitle generator transcribes the speech into an SRT in 100 languages at 1 credit per minute (minimum 5 credits per file), so a 40-minute video costs 40 credits (4¢). Only the audio is uploaded for the AI step and it is deleted within 30 minutes of the job finishing. Check the result in the editor, then either copy the SRT next to the video or burn it in.