Search FAQs

Subtitle and metadata search have a Filters panel in the left sidebar. On smaller screens, phones and tablets, it is hidden by default. Tap Filters at the top of subtitle results, or beside Search in metadata search, to open it. Use Close to dismiss the panel.

Set your options and click Update. Available controls include:

• Views and Likes: minimum and maximum sliders.
• Video Duration: a minimum and maximum length slider.
• Upload date: from/to fields, with More shortcuts for Today, This Week, This Month or This Year.
• Subtitle search: lists of matching channels, categories, languages and countries. Select an entry to filter by it; use the trash badge to exclude a category.
• Metadata search: license, livestream/regular-video status, listed/unlisted status and complete/partial data selectors.

Metadata search also has Text in title, Channel with Include/Exclude, Auto Lang with Match Manual, Manual Subs with Exact Match, and Country fields. Filters combine, so a video must satisfy all active conditions. Selecting several Manual Subs languages requires all those languages, rather than any one of them.

Active filters appear as tags above the results:

• Click a tag's x to remove that filter and reload the search.
• In subtitle search, Clear Filters removes additional filters together.
• The search-text tag cannot be removed; edit the query instead.
• Some tags reflect a setting or search mode, such as Hide Unavailable Videos or Attempt Match to Video Language in manual search.

Filters are retained in the URL, so you can bookmark a filtered search. In metadata search, Show Trends opens a chart; zooming it and choosing Filter By Chart Dates applies that period as the upload date range.

It depends on the page:

• Subtitle search: open the "Languages" section in the left sidebar and click a language. Each entry shows how many videos match.
• Metadata search: use the "Auto Lang" dropdown to filter by the automatically detected language. You can also pick one or more languages in "Manual Subs" to find videos with manually added subtitles, captions or transcripts in those languages.

Filmot supports non-Latin scripts. For Japanese, Chinese, Thai and other text indexed without spaces between words, put the word or expression in double quotation marks.

These scripts are indexed character by character. Without quotes, each character becomes a separate search term, so a video can match when the characters appear anywhere in its transcript, in a different order or far apart. With quotes, Filmot requires the exact sequence of characters.

For example, search "日本語" rather than 日本語, or "ภาษาไทย" rather than ภาษาไทย. To accept several expressions, quote each one and join them with OR: "東京" | "大阪".

Some channels only provide manually uploaded subtitles. If automatic subtitle search returns no results, try Search Manual Subtitles and inspect the video's AutoSubs and ManualSubs columns in Metadata search. In manual search, setting Attempt Match to Video Language to No can reveal tracks excluded because Filmot cannot determine which language matches the audio.

In manual subtitle search, Attempt Match to Video Language tries to keep subtitle tracks that match the language spoken in the video. A video may have several manually uploaded tracks, including translations, and Filmot cannot always tell which one represents the audio.

The filter assumes a match when:

• There is one manual subtitle track and no automatic captions.
• A manual track has the same language as the video's automatic subtitles.

Ambiguous cases, such as several manual languages with no automatic captions, can be excluded. This can hide a video even when its manual transcript contains your search term.

To include those tracks, click the Attempt Match to Video Language: Yes tag above the results and switch it to No. Also confirm that you are running Search Manual Subtitles rather than automatic subtitle search, since the two indexes are searched separately.

The Auto Lang filter in Metadata search represents the automatic-caption languages available in Filmot's index. Manually uploaded Chinese or Mandarin subtitles belong to Manual Subs, so they do not appear as automatic-caption tracks simply because they contain Chinese text.

If Chinese or Mandarin is not offered in Auto Lang, use Manual Subs to find videos with collected manual subtitles in that language. Check the AutoSubs and ManualSubs columns to see which track types Filmot has for a video, and use manual subtitle search to search their text.

Filmot displays captions collected from YouTube or uploaded there by creators; it does not generate transcripts itself.

Leave the language filters empty to search without a subtitle-language restriction.

In Metadata search, selecting several Manual Subs languages requires a video to have subtitles in all of them. The selections are combined with AND, rather than matching any one of the chosen languages. Selecting every language would therefore return very few videos, rather than search all languages freely.

If you want results for several specific languages independently, run a separate search for each one.

The Exact Match checkbox beside Manual Subs restricts the set of indexed manual subtitle languages. It is separate from searching for an exact quoted phrase or exact wording.

In Metadata search, selecting English and German normally finds videos that have manual captions in both languages, including videos that also carry other manual subtitle languages. With Exact Match turned on, the indexed manual subtitle language set must consist only of the languages you selected, so a video with English, German and French manual subtitles would be excluded. Its tooltip states that it keeps only the selected languages.

This setting concerns the subtitle tracks Filmot has collected, not a guarantee that YouTube currently offers no additional tracks. It does not require the video to be spoken in both languages, compare translation quality or match identical wording. Use the Auto Lang filter when you want to narrow results by automatically detected spoken language, and quote words in a text field when you want an exact phrase match.

Filmot does not provide a reliable filter for European versus Brazilian Portuguese. Automatic caption tracks generally use the language code pt for Portuguese. Some manually uploaded tracks use regional codes such as pt-PT or pt-BR, but many are also labeled pt.

As an approximation, filter by the channel's country. In Metadata search, combine Portuguese in Auto Lang with Country, such as Portugal or Brazil. Subtitle search also has a Countries list in the sidebar.

A channel's country is self-reported and may be blank. Country filtering therefore misses some relevant videos and does not establish the dialect spoken in every result.

Filmot does not currently offer a filter or sort for subtitle difficulty, vocabulary difficulty or a language-learning level. You cannot select videos by an easy-to-hard score or learner category.

Metadata search can narrow videos by detected language, manual subtitle languages, upload dates and other video details. Those filters identify available languages and metadata; they do not measure how easy the captions are to understand.

Transverso searches for a word or expression in one subtitle language and shows corresponding lines in a second language from the same videos. It helps you see how a phrase is translated in real caption context.

1. Enter your word or expression, using double quotes for an exact phrase.
2. Choose the Search Language, or Detect Language, and the Target Language.
3. Run the search. Results show both language versions, a button to play the video at the matching moment and a link to its side-by-side subtitles page.

Transverso uses selected manual subtitles aligned between language pairs. It does not use automatic captions and does not cover the entire subtitle index, so some videos found by regular search will not appear. Less common language pairs may have fewer examples.

Use subtitle search for broader coverage, or a video's side-by-side page to compare two available subtitle tracks directly.

Search for a word, idiom or expression to hear it used in real YouTube videos. This can help with pronunciation, listening comprehension, conversational vocabulary and understanding how a phrase actually sounds in context.

1. Enter the word, or put a multiword expression in double quotes, such as "ça marche".
2. Search automatic or manual subtitles and select your target language in the results sidebar. Automatic captions are often useful for locating spoken examples; a manual subtitle track may be a translation rather than the language you hear.
3. Play a result at its matching timestamp. On Settings, the Delay Video Start option can begin playback a few seconds before the match so you catch the surrounding sentence.
4. Compare examples from several videos or channels. Replay the passage and repeat it aloud if you are practising pronunciation or shadowing.

Country and channel filters can help you look for regional usage, but a channel's country does not guarantee the speaker's accent, dialect or native language. Listen to the audio and check the context: captions can mishear or mis-transcribe words, and a frequently occurring expression is not necessarily appropriate for every situation. Filmot surfaces real spoken examples; it does not score or assess your pronunciation automatically.

Yes. A video's side-by-side subtitles page displays two caption tracks next to each other with the video. Choose a language for each column from the tracks Filmot has collected for that video.

The current subtitle line is highlighted during playback, and clicking a line starts the video at that timestamp. In Metadata search, click a subtitle-language flag to open this view.

Only available tracks can be selected; Filmot does not generate a missing translation. On Settings, Language Indicator controls whether subtitle languages are displayed as flags, short codes or full names.

Use the values listed on Filmot's API Reference Values page. The API's country IDs and subtitle language codes should be taken from those tables rather than inferred from a country's name or a standard code list.

Countries use numeric IDs. For example, the reference lists the United States as 217, the United Kingdom as 153 and Brazil as 14; do not substitute US, GB or BR in a parameter that expects a country ID.

Subtitle languages use the codes in the language table, such as en for English, de for German and pt for Portuguese. Some values can be unexpected: Hebrew is listed as iw, while Chinese and Cantonese appear separately as zh and yue.

Check the API documentation or the OpenAPI specification for the parameter name, data type and representation the endpoint you are calling expects. The reference tables identify the accepted values; they do not replace the endpoint's request format or guarantee that every language has matching indexed videos.

If a filtered request returns no matches, verify the code or ID and try removing that filter before concluding that the underlying videos are missing.