Netflix subtitle requirements

Netflix publishes its caption rules in Partner Help style guides: one for English and other Latin-script languages and one for Arabic, each setting hard limits on line length and reading speed, plus shared timing articles both link to for cue duration and the gap between cues. CueForge checks every one of those limits for free, in your browser, before you deliver a file.

The table below is not a summary someone typed up from the spec. It is generated from the same netflix-latin and netflix-arabic preset files the QC engine loads at runtime, so a threshold on this page can never drift from the threshold the tool actually enforces.

Run the Netflix Latin preset for free →

The thresholds, generated from the live presets

Six parametrized rules carry the bulk of the Netflix spec. CueForge ships them as two verified presets, netflix-latin and netflix-arabic, both free to run in the studio QC inspector: no account or payment required. For what the reading-speed number actually measures, and a live checker to score a line against it, see the subtitle reading-speed guide.

Values read live from the presets’ rule config. The line-length and reading-speed rows trace to the Netflix Partner Help English/USA Timed Text Style Guide and the Arabic Timed Text Style Guide, the two documents the netflix-latin and netflix-arabic presets cite as their reference. The duration rows come from Netflix’s separate Timed Text Style Guide: General Requirements article, and the gap row from its Subtitle Timing Guidelines article; both language guides link out to those shared documents. The reading-speed caps shown are the adult-program limits, which is what the presets encode — both language guides cap children’s programming at 17 characters/second, and the Arabic guide allows higher rates for SDH. The Arabic diacritics exclusion is how CueForge’s preset implements the character count, not a rule stated in the Netflix guides.

The structural checks that run alongside them

Both presets also flag problems that have nothing to do with counting characters: overlapping cues, reversed timing (a cue that ends before it starts), empty cues and unclosed formatting tags are flagged as errors; duplicate cues as warnings.

None of these are stylistic judgment calls. They are file-integrity problems that break playback or a delivery QC pass, regardless of which language's rules you check against.

Latin vs Arabic: what actually differs

The character-count cap is the same 42 characters either way. Arabic just enforces it through a dedicated arabic-line-length rule instead of max-chars-per-line, so the count can treat combining diacritics as zero-width rather than as extra characters. The reading-speed rule carries the same exclusion: those diacritics never count toward characters per second.

The Arabic preset adds checks the Latin one has no use for: bidirectional punctuation placement, consistent digit style, isolating embedded Latin-script runs and stripping kashida justification. The punctuation-spacing rule, by contrast, is switched off for Arabic: a rule tuned for Latin punctuation spacing doesn't apply to Arabic script.

Check for free, deliver with Pro

Running either preset, or any built-in QC preset, is a free-tier feature with no file limit. What sits behind CueForge Pro is the delivery step: exporting to IMSC/TTML for a streaming platform, and cloning a verified preset into a custom one tuned to a specific client spec. Pro is $99/year or $12/month, with a 7-day free trial.

Delivering to a platform that expects RTL captions? Run the Arabic checklist directly instead of switching presets by hand.

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