Subtitle Language Support in Cinegy Subtitling Service

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With the recent addition of subtitle support in Cinegy Subtitling Service, we’ve received a number of questions regarding supported languages. This post clarifies the current capabilities and outlines our future plans.

Cinegy Subtitling Service currently supports two subtitle formats: Teletext and DVB Subtitles.

Teletext is a legacy European standard originally developed for analog broadcasting. In the context of subtitles, it uses a fixed set of character tables defined in ETSI EN 300 706, which includes support for:

  • Latin-based scripts (Western and Central European languages)

  • Greek

  • Cyrillic

  • Arabic

  • Hebrew

These are implemented via specific national and multilingual character sets within the constraints of 8-bit encoding. Subtitles are transmitted as binary data and rendered on the receiver side (e.g., a television set). Due to the structure of the format, language support is fundamentally limited to these predefined sets and cannot be easily extended.

The subset of languages that are currently supported by Cinegy Subtitling Service Teletext encoder can be found here. While the supported languages list will be extended in the future versions, it will still be limited to the set defined by ETSI EN 300 706 standard.

DVB Subtitles, by contrast, are bitmap-based and capable of visually rendering any script supported by Unicode. This makes them suitable for a wide range of languages, including those using complex or non-Latin scripts (e.g., Chinese, Hindi, Thai, etc.). Although Bitmap subtitles are more bandwidth-intensive than Teletext or text-based subtitles.

At present, Cinegy Subtitling Service uses a unified language validation model based on the limitations of the Teletext format. However, we are planning to decouple validation for each format:

  • Teletext will continue to support only the languages defined in its standard.

  • DVB Subtitles will be extended to include a broader set of languages in future updates.

Summary

Cinegy Subtitling Service supports both old and modern subtitle formats with the subset of languages being actively extended. Teletext has some language limits as it follows an older standard. But DVB Subtitles can show almost any language, including complex scripts like Chinese or Hindi.