Generate subtitles from audio: Quven, Plex and Emby

Quven writes the missing subtitle from the film’s own dialogue, on the machine that holds your films. Quven is a self-hosted media server by Quven Technologies S.R.L., free for personal use, and with Pro it’ll listen to a film that has no subtitle and write one, so the audio is never sent anywhere. Plex and Emby, as their own support pages describe them on 6 October 2026, go looking for a file that somebody else has already written.

Why would a film have no subtitle at all?

A rip of an old DVD may carry only the dub, and a home recording never had one. Online subtitle databases grow from releases that thousands of people own, so the copy on your drive has to match one closely enough for the timing to land, and Emby’s own article says that with “Require a hash match” turned on, files you’ve ripped or recorded with its DVR “will never get a hash match”.

What do Plex and Emby offer when a subtitle is missing?

A search, in both cases:

• Plex searches OpenSubtitles.com by title, file hash and language. Its Auto-Sync shifts an SRT you already have, needs a Plex Pass on the owner’s and the viewer’s accounts, and writes nothing.
• Emby downloads through plugins, and its matrix puts in-playback subtitle search on the paid side. A request to build Whisper in has sat in its forum since October 2022.

On either server, what’s the alternative? A separate program beside it, such as Subgen, a community container that runs Whisper from the server’s webhooks.

	Quven	Plex	Emby
Subtitle written from the audio	Built in, with Pro	Not built in	Not built in
Where a missing subtitle comes from	The film’s own dialogue	A search of OpenSubtitles.com	Plugins that download one
What leaves your machine	Nothing	Title, file hash, language	A search through each plugin
Hardware transcoding	Free on every plan	Plex Pass	Emby Premiere

How do you ask Quven for one?

As the server’s owner, from the player:

1. Start the film in the desktop app or the web client.
2. Open the subtitle controls and ask for a subtitle. A usable text track or sidecar file is offered first.
3. Choose the dialogue stream, which matters on a disc carrying a dub and the original language.
4. Wait for the job, which survives a restart and is shared by two people asking for the same track.

The step-by-step guide walks through the panel.

What happens on the server?

FFmpeg pulls the chosen stream into 16 kHz mono, a voice-activity model finds where people speak, and whisper.cpp turns the speech into timed text. Although the multilingual model is close to half a gigabyte, you won’t install it by hand: the server fetches it the first time and checks its SHA-256 digest. Recognition runs through Metal on Apple silicon and Vulkan on Windows and Linux with a dedicated card, or on the processor with at most three quarters of the cores, so someone watching from the same server can carry on, and on the NVIDIA card we measured in August a two-hour film took about two and a half minutes (engineering note).

The audio, the decoded samples and the working files stay on the server and are deleted when the job ends, finished or not.

What comes back?

An ordinary subtitle track stored against that one file, which every profile can choose in any Quven app and which plays on every plan. When the library folder is writable, Quven also leaves a copy beside the film, named with quven-transcribed and the language before .vtt, so the text moves with the file. The privacy guide sets out what does leave a Quven server, and when.

Max or Lifetime can translate the transcript as a separate step, sending only its text (translation guide). Picture subtitles from Blu-ray and DVD cost the server nothing (why), and history can come across from Plex or Jellyfin.

Why choose now?

Download Quven and your library plays tonight, free for personal use. Pro adds the subtitle written from the audio, with the managed relay and the web client, and Lifetime is every Max capability for one payment; the plans page shows today’s figures.

Frequently asked questions