Frequently asked questions

No, but the quality is very decent. Podstr translates existing subtitles — clean text, not a speech-to-text transcript. This is fundamentally better than AI subs generated from audio: no recognition errors, no garbled words.

Google Translate processes sentences one by one, without context. AI models like Claude and Gemini see 100 lines of dialogue at once — they understand who's speaking, catch humor, slang, cultural references. The difference is especially noticeable in comedies and dramas.

The model can't see the picture — it doesn't know if a man or woman is speaking. So gendered forms may be wrong. Neologisms like “herstory” might be translated literally. These are format limitations, not model limitations.

Claude Sonnet delivers the best quality — humor, slang, context all on point. Via OpenRouter you can choose a model: DeepSeek and Gemini start from a penny per episode, Claude Haiku offers excellent value. Model comparison →

YouTube (any video with manual CC), Plex, ARTE, Filmzie and any site with HLS subtitles.

No. Chrome extensions only work on desktop (Windows, macOS, Linux). Mobile devices don't support extensions.

Not yet. The extension is built for Chrome's Manifest V3. In theory Edge supports Chrome extensions, but this hasn't been tested. Firefox and Safari are not in the near-term plans.

You need an OpenRouter API key to translate. Registration is free, pay per token — from a penny per episode.

Depends on the model. Llama 4 Maverick — free (with rate limits), DeepSeek V3.2 — $0.007, Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite — $0.02, Claude Haiku — $0.06, Claude Sonnet — $0.19. Price per 40-minute episode (~500 lines). Detailed comparison →

Yes — Llama 4 Maverick is available for free via OpenRouter. There are rate limits (20/min, 200/day), but it's enough for watching.

Press b during playback. Original subtitles appear on top and translation on the bottom. Press again to show translation only.

Keys [ and ] shift subtitles by ±0.5 seconds. Key \ resets the offset to zero. There are also buttons in the extension panel.

The extension does not collect personal data. Your API key is stored locally in the browser and is never sent to our server. Only subtitle text (for translation and caching), page title and URL (for catalog navigation) are sent to the server.

Subtitles are loaded from video service CDNs — their URLs are unpredictable. Without broad access the extension can't download .vtt files. Access is used only for intercepting subtitles, not for reading page content.

Check: 1) the extension is enabled in chrome://extensions/; 2) the site has a video with subtitles (not all videos have .vtt subtitles); 3) reload the page — the extension needs to load before playback starts.

Chrome's service worker may go to sleep after 30 seconds of inactivity. Reload the page — if the translation was partially complete, it will continue from cache. If not, start the translation again.

Open chrome://extensions/, find Podstr, click “Details” → “Clear extension data”. This deletes all saved translations and settings.