Subtitles & Captions

Subtitles, captions, and SRT/VTT files all describe the same artifact: a time-coded transcript that a video player overlays on the picture. The differences are mostly conventions: subtitles assume the viewer can hear and translate dialogue; closed captions include non-speech audio (music cues, sound effects, speaker labels) for the deaf and hard-of-hearing.

Format choice depends on your target. SRT (SubRip) is the most universally supported — YouTube, VLC, Premiere, Final Cut, DaVinci Resolve, every desktop editor, every social-media uploader. WebVTT is the W3C standard for HTML5 video and the format you want for browser-native players, Vimeo, Cloudflare Stream, and modern CMS systems.

Already published on YouTube? Then the subtitles usually exist — you just need to download them. Paste the link into our YouTube subtitle downloader to get the caption track as TXT, SRT or VTT, then follow our guides to edit and re-time the SRT or add it to a video. If the video has no captions, here's what to do.

If you're producing for social media (TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts), most creators burn captions directly into the video pixels rather than using a sidecar file — captioned clips outperform un-captioned ones by 2-3x in retention. Use our SRT export then run it through a tool like Headliner, Riverside, or Descript to burn in styled captions.