Add subtitles to video

How it works

1. 1

   Add video and subtitles

   Drop your video, then upload an .srt file or paste the subtitles. Both stay on your device.

2. 2

   Style and preview

   Pick size, color, outline or background box, top or bottom, and watch the cues appear live on the preview.

3. 3

   Download

   An MP4 with the subtitles burned into the picture, visible in every player.

Burned-in captions beat subtitle tracks nearly everywhere

A subtitle file sitting next to a video is an elegant idea that almost nothing on the internet honors. Post to a social feed and the SRT is simply discarded; the platform takes your video and nothing else. Send an MP4 with an embedded subtitle track and whether it appears depends on the player, the device, and a setting the viewer has probably never opened.

Burning the text into the picture removes every one of those variables. The captions are pixels, so they are as reliable as the footage itself: they appear on a phone, a television, a feed, an old player, and inside a screen recording somebody makes of your video later. The cost is that they cannot be turned off, which is why the styling is worth getting right.

It is worth remembering how much of this is not an accessibility nicety. A large share of social video is watched with the sound off, in public, at speed, so captions are frequently the only version of your audio that anyone receives. That reframes the styling question: the text has to be legible on a phone held at arm's length, against whatever is behind it, which is what the outline and the background box are for.

Burn subtitles into a video without uploading it

The video and the SRT are read from your disk and rendered together on your own machine, with a live preview so you can see the styling against the actual footage rather than guessing at it. Nothing is uploaded and nothing is watermarked.

That matters for the reason captions exist: the SRT is a complete transcript of everything said in the video. Uploading a recording and its transcript to a third party in order to combine two files you already have is a poor trade, and it is not one you have to make.

SRT is plain text, so a file exported from a transcription tool can be opened and fixed in any editor before you burn it in, and errors in the transcript are far cheaper to correct now than after the text is permanently in the picture.

Why nothing uploads

Other tools send your video to their servers, which costs them money per file, so they add watermarks, cap file sizes, and make you sign up. This tool does the work right here in your browser using your own device. Your file is never uploaded, so there is no wait, no watermark, no size limit, and no account.

Questions

What does "burning" subtitles mean?

The text is rendered permanently into the picture (hardcoded), so it shows everywhere, social feeds, TVs, old players, with exactly the styling you chose. It can't be turned off afterwards.

Where do I get an SRT file?

Most transcription tools (YouTube Studio, Whisper, professional captioners) export .srt. It's a plain text format, you can even write or fix one right in the paste box here.

Can I style the subtitles?

Yes: three sizes, four colors, black outline or a translucent background box, and top or bottom placement. The live preview shows the result as the video plays.

Why don't my cues show in the preview?

Check the timestamp lines, SRT needs the form 00:00:01,000 --> 00:00:03,000. The tool tells you how many cues it recognized.

Do my files get uploaded?

No. The rendering happens in your browser; video and subtitles never leave your device.

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