Why's the v5.x.x take so much space?

[StentMan]

The installer used to be 10MB, now it's 50MB. Installed, it took less than 30MB, now it seems like it's more than 100MB.
The app was completely redone from scratch, but why is it so bloated?

[niksedk]

Nothing got added for the fun of it — most of that 50 MB is mpv.

Actual numbers for the Windows x64 setup (5.0.0):

	on disk	inside the installer
libmpv-2.dll	118 MB	~30 MB
Subtitle Edit itself	~81 MB	~20 MB

So ~60% of the download is the video player. SE 4 never shipped it — it downloaded mpv on demand the first time you selected it as video player, so it stayed out of the installer size. SE 5 bundles it so video playback works out of the box; it's installed to %appdata%\Subtitle Edit\, not the program folder. That's also the bulk of the installed footprint you're seeing.

The remaining ~81 MB is the app. SE 4 got most of its UI for free from Windows — WinForms/GDI+ are part of the OS and .NET Framework was preinstalled. SE 5 uses Avalonia, which brings its own rendering stack along:

• libSkiaSharp.dll 11 MB, ANGLE 5 MB, HarfBuzz 1.7 MB — renderer and text shaping
• icon packs 8 MB, Inter font 1.8 MB, TextMate grammars 6.4 MB (syntax highlighting in the editors)
• SubtitleEdit.dll 25 MB, ~12 MB of that embedded assets — 6.8 MB is UI translations (every language ships inside the exe), plus dictionaries, OCR data, 7-Zip and TTS data
• the rest is Avalonia and a handful of libraries. The IL isn't trimmed, since trimming breaks the reflection-heavy parts

Note the Inno Setup installer does not contain the .NET runtime — it checks for .NET 10 and points you at the download page if it's missing. (The 102 MB portable zip is the self-contained build: .NET runtime + mpv included, nothing to install.)

[GrampaWildWilly]

I have SE on my system, not installed. My system is Windows 11 Pro 64-bit version 25H2 build 26200.8894. I have the portable version that Nik mentioned. I do not have it installed in %AppData%, which I gather is what the formal installer does. I have it installed in C:\Subtitle Edit V5. That directory is, according to Windows Properties, 9.26G. However, within the directory I have the SpeechToText subdirectory. Inside that, I have Purfview Faster Whisper with a couple of models. That subdirectory alone occupies 8.77G. Doing a little higher math here, that works out to 0.49G, a bit under 500M, for SE without the transcription/translation tool. In today's world, that is not a huge app. It's a drop in the bucket on my C-drive, which is a 2T SSD. The portable zip is 104M & it unzips files occupying 263M. So my SE directory contains a few things that accumulate over time, like waveforms & such, to make up the difference between the 263M & the 500M. I can't call that bloat.