Add Hindi Subtitles to a Video

Before you start

Three things decide how smoothly this goes, and each is worth settling before you open the file.

• The video file. MP4, MOV, M4V, WebM and MKV open in the editor. Phone recordings and videos saved from WhatsApp are usually MP4 and work as they are.
• The spoken language. Hindi speech is transcribed into Hindi, and English or any other supported language can be translated into Hindi. Among Indian languages, Hindi is the only one the AI handles.
• A Google sign-in, if you want AI to write the text. AI subtitles cost 1 credit per minute with a 5-credit minimum, so a 15-minute class costs 15 credits (1.5¢). Top-ups are paid in rupees through Cashfree, and signed-in accounts also receive 10 free credits a day.

If a translator has already sent you a Hindi SRT, you need no account at all.

Step by step: Hindi subtitles on your video

1. Open the editor on this page and select the video.
2. Keep "Write the subtitles automatically with AI" switched on. For Hindi speech leave "Subtitle language" on auto-detect; for an English video choose Hindi.
3. Press AI subtitles. Your browser pulls out and compresses the audio and sends only that to the server; the picture stays on your computer.
4. When the lines appear, play the video and correct them in the list. Type with whatever Hindi input you normally use, a Devanagari keyboard layout or a phonetic input tool.
5. Open Style and choose Mukta, Poppins or Baloo 2 in the font list, then set the size so the marks above the headline are clearly visible on the preview.
6. Render the video, let the encode finish, and download the MP4. Export SRT as well if you plan to upload the subtitles to YouTube separately.

Fonts that draw Devanagari

Three of the nineteen bundled fonts carry Devanagari letters of their own: Mukta, Poppins and Baloo 2. Choose one of them and the Hindi and any English words in the same line share one design.

Mukta

A plain, open sans-serif designed for Devanagari and Latin together. The safe pick for lectures, long videos and dense text.

Poppins

Geometric and modern. It is also the face behind the Modern and Social Media presets, so those presets already show Hindi in a matching style.

Baloo 2

Rounded and friendly, a display face. Good for short social clips, children's content and titles; heavy going over a 20-minute talk.

Any other font

Still works. The Hindi falls back to Noto Sans Devanagari while Latin words keep the face you chose, so one line can mix two designs.

Mukta and Baloo 2 have no italic style, and slanted Devanagari is rare in print anyway, so leave Italic off. UPPERCASE does nothing to Devanagari, which has no capital letters, but it will capitalise any English words in the line.

Matras, conjuncts and line height

Devanagari stacks vowel signs above and below the headline, the shirorekha: ि, ी, े, ै and the bindu above, ु, ू and ृ below. Those marks are where subtitles go wrong in many tools, clipped by a box that is too shallow or pressed into the row above.

In this editor, the height of each row and of its background box is measured from the font's own ascent and descent with a Devanagari letter included, so marks above and below stay inside the box at any size. The one setting that can still cause a collision is Line height. If a subtitle wraps to two rows and you drag Line height towards its minimum, the ु of the top row can touch the ि of the row underneath. Keep it near the default whenever Hindi lines wrap.

Conjuncts such as क्ष, त्र, ज्ञ and श्र count as one character in the editor's warnings, because the length checks count what a reader sees rather than the code points underneath. The limits match those for English: 42 characters per line and 21 characters per second.

Troubleshooting Hindi lines

• A plain system font instead of the one you picked: fonts load from the internet, and a slow or blocked connection delays them. Until they arrive, the editor uses installed fonts such as Nirmala UI on Windows or Kohinoor Devanagari on a Mac. Reload once the connection is back.
• An imported SRT full of Latin letters and symbols instead of Hindi: the file was typed in a legacy non-Unicode font such as Kruti Dev, which stores Hindi as Latin codes. Convert it to Unicode first; the editor reads subtitle files as UTF-8 text.
• English words written in Devanagari, or the reverse: Hindi speech borrows English constantly, and recognition has to choose one script for each borrowed word. Decide whether मोबाइल or mobile suits your viewers and make the whole video agree.
• Digits: Hindi can use Devanagari numerals (१२३) or 0–9. Both are correct; pick one.
• Names of people, places and brands: unfamiliar names are spelled by sound. Check each one against the spelling its owner uses.
• Translated lines out of step: subtitles translated from English are timed by text length, so drag the edge of any line that appears before the speaker reaches it.

For a fuller review routine, see fixing auto-generated subtitles.

Hinglish, two-line subtitles and other variations

Hinglish in Roman letters. Whisper writes Hindi in Devanagari; it doesn't transliterate into Roman script, and there is no Hinglish option in the menu. If your audience reads "aap kaise ho" more easily than "आप कैसे हो", type or paste the romanised lines yourself, ideally over the AI's timing so that only the words change. Translation versus transliteration explains why these are two separate jobs.

Hindi and English together. Press Enter inside a line's text box to start a second row, then put the Hindi on top and the English underneath. The AI writes one language per run, so the second row is pasted in from another export. Keep both rows short.

Hindi video, English viewers. Choose English as the subtitle language and follow English subtitles on a video, or let the Hindi to English video translator dub it.

English video, Hindi voice. When the audience would rather listen than read, English to Hindi video translation replaces the soundtrack.

For a Hindi SRT on its own, the Hindi subtitle generator skips the rendering step, and Hindi video to text gives you a plain transcript.

For reels and shorts

Hindi reels are mostly vertical. Start from the Social Media preset, which already uses Poppins, then switch on "Show safe area" to keep the Devanagari clear of the app's buttons and caption overlay. Devanagari rows stand taller than Latin ones, so a size slightly smaller than you would use for English often looks better in a 9:16 frame. Instagram Reels subtitles covers that layout in more depth.

About the subtitle editor on this page

Opens

MP4, MOV, M4V, WebM, MKV videos your browser can decode

Subtitles from

AI (from the speech, optionally translated into one of 21 languages), an SRT or VTT file, or typing them in

You download

An MP4 with the subtitles drawn into the picture at the original resolution and frame rate, plus SRT and VTT files

Cost

Editing, styling, rendering and SRT/VTT export are free, with no account and no watermark. AI subtitles cost 1 credit per minute (5-credit minimum per video); signing in with Google gives 100 free credits and accounts get 10 free credits a day

Privacy

The video never leaves your device and is rendered in your browser. Only for AI subtitles is the audio sent, over HTTPS, and it is deleted within 30 minutes of delivery

Rendering needs

Chrome or Edge 94+, Safari 16.4+, or Firefox 130+ on a computer. Editing and SRT/VTT export work in any current browser