Captions & Subtitles

What is Closed Captions?

Closed captions are text overlays stored as a separate data track alongside the video, allowing viewers to toggle them on or off in their player settings.

Closed Captions Explained

Closed captions (CC) are encoded as metadata rather than burned into the video pixels. They are the accessibility standard for broadcast TV, YouTube, and streaming platforms. Formats include SRT, VTT, TTML, and EBU-STL. Closed captions can be auto-generated by platforms, uploaded by creators, or produced by professional transcription services. They support features like font customization, background opacity, and positioning adjustments by the viewer. For short-form social video, closed captions alone are insufficient because most platforms default to captions off. Creators typically use burned-in captions for social and closed captions for accessibility compliance.

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Related Terms

SRT Subtitles

SRT (SubRip Text) is a plain-text subtitle file format that stores timed text with sequence numbers, timestamps, and subtitle content for displaying text over video.

Burned-In Captions

Burned-in captions (also called hardcoded or open captions) are text overlays permanently embedded into the video pixels, visible to all viewers without toggles.

Auto Caption

Auto captioning is the process of automatically generating text captions from spoken audio in a video using AI speech recognition, without manual transcription.

Transcription

Transcription is the process of converting spoken audio from a video or audio recording into written text, producing a verbatim or edited text document representing the spoken content.