Add Subtitles to Video

You supply the subtitles — this does not transcribe

Worth being clear straight away, because several tools in this category do transcribe and you may have arrived expecting it. This one does not listen to your video or write the captions for you. It takes subtitles you already have and burns them in.

If you have an SRT — exported from an editor, downloaded with a video, or produced by a transcription service — upload it and you are done. If you do not, switch to manual mode and add each line with a start and end time. That is entirely practical for the short clips most people are captioning, and tedious for anything long, which is the honest trade.

Burned in versus soft subtitles

This is the decision that matters, and it is why this tool works the way it does.

Burned-in subtitles — what you get here — are drawn into the video frames themselves. They cannot be turned off, restyled or translated, and they show up everywhere without exception. Soft subtitles are a separate track the player overlays, which can be toggled on and off and swapped for another language.

For social video, burned-in is almost always right. Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn and X play video muted by default and give the viewer no way to enable a subtitle track; a soft subtitle file simply does not exist as far as those platforms are concerned. The same applies to a video sent over WhatsApp or embedded in a slide deck. Burned in means it works everywhere, for everyone, with nothing to switch on.

Choose soft subtitles instead when you are uploading to YouTube — which handles SRT files properly and lets viewers pick a language — or when the same video needs captions in several languages.

Making them readable

White is the default and works on most footage. Yellow reads better over bright or pale backgrounds, where white starts to disappear — snow, sky, a whiteboard. Black is for consistently light scenes.

Size matters more than people expect. Medium suits a video watched on a desktop; if it is going to be watched on a phone in a feed, Large is usually the right call, because subtitle text that looks generous on your monitor becomes small on a handset held at arm's length. Bottom is standard, but switch to Top when the lower part of the frame has something important in it or when the platform puts its own interface there.

Your audio is untouched

Only the picture is re-encoded to draw the text; the audio track is copied across exactly as it was, so there is no loss of sound quality. The first use of any video tool here downloads the FFmpeg engine, about 25MB, cached afterwards, and the work then happens on your own device — so a long video takes longer on a phone than on a laptop.

Related tools

Trim Video cuts the clip to the part you are captioning first, which shortens both the typing and the processing. Video Compressor reduces the finished file for upload, and Video Converter changes its format.