Add Subtitles to a YouTube Video

Two places a YouTube subtitle can live

Long-form YouTube gives you a choice most platforms don't. You can hand YouTube a subtitle file and let its player draw the words, or you can draw the words into the frames yourself before the upload. They solve different problems, and plenty of channels use both.

Caption track in YouTube Studio

An SRT or VTT file added under Subtitles. Viewers turn it on with the CC button, can switch it off again, and can restyle it in the player's caption settings. One video can carry tracks in many languages, and a track can be edited or replaced after the video is public.

Burned-in subtitles

Drawn into every frame by the editor on this page and saved as an MP4. Always visible, in your font, colour and position, including in embeds and in copies people download. One language per file, and changing a word means a new upload.

One editing session gives you the raw material for both. Render video produces the burned-in MP4. Export SRT and Export VTT save the same lines as a plain subtitle file containing text and timing only; fonts, colours and position stay behind, because YouTube's player applies its own look to tracks.

Where an uploaded track earns its place

A caption track respects choice. Some viewers want a clean picture, some want text, and some want text in a different language from the one spoken. With tracks, each person decides, and a deaf or hard-of-hearing viewer can enlarge the text or change its colours in the player instead of living with yours.

Tracks also scale across languages. Add Spanish, Hindi and French files to the same video and viewers pick one from the settings menu. YouTube can additionally machine-translate an existing track for viewers on the fly; how well that works is covered in YouTube's auto-translated captions.

And tracks stay fixable. Spot a misspelt name after the video has thousands of views, correct the file in Studio, and the URL, comments and statistics are untouched. Whether YouTube's reading of track text helps a video get found is a separate, debated question; captions and YouTube search looks at it without hype.

The cost is visibility. A track only appears for people who switch captions on, and the file doesn't travel when you repost the video to a chat, a website player that ignores tracks, or another platform.

Where burned-in subtitles earn theirs

Burned subtitles need no button. They show in every player, on every device, in the muted previews YouTube plays on some screens, and in the clip a fan saves and shares elsewhere. Their design is yours too, so the text can match your thumbnails and channel graphics.

The limits are just as real. A file holds one language, so a viewer who can't read it is stuck with text they can't remove. A viewer who needs larger type can't resize it. And YouTube Studio offers no way to swap the file behind a published video; a typo spotted next week means uploading again as a new video, without the old one's views.

Which route fits which video

No single answer covers every channel. These patterns help you decide:

• A tutorial or explainer aimed at several language markets: tracks, one per language.
• An English video with one guest speaking another language: burn only that guest's lines, the approach known as forced subtitles, and leave full tracks optional.
• A video that will also be embedded on a website, shown at an event or sent around in chat: burned in, so the words survive everywhere.
• An edit-heavy channel where on-screen text is part of the comedy or pacing: burned in, because the timing and look are creative choices.
• A lecture or course archive where students want an uncluttered frame: tracks.
• Unsure? Start with a track. It can be removed tomorrow; burned text can't.

Doing both without a clash

YouTube draws its own captions near the bottom of the frame and lifts them when the control bar appears. If your burned subtitles sit in the same place and a viewer presses CC, two lines collide or stack. Some ways to combine the two cleanly:

• Burn and upload different things. Forced lines go into the picture; complete transcripts go into tracks.
• Burn the spoken language and upload only translations, then move the burned lines up with the Top anchor or the "Nudge up / down" slider so the CC track has the lower edge to itself.
• Avoid uploading a track that repeats the burned text word for word. Viewers who turn it on just see everything twice.
• Watch the resemblance. The YouTube preset deliberately imitates the player's caption look: white Roboto on a dark box. If you also offer tracks, that similarity can make viewers think CC is already on. Classic or Minimal reads more clearly as part of the video. YouTube-style subtitles covers when imitating the player helps.

Burning subtitles into a YouTube upload

1. Open the editor on this page and choose your finished export: MP4, MOV, M4V, WebM or MKV. Style opens on the YouTube preset.
2. Get the lines. Keep "Write the subtitles automatically with AI" on, use Import SRT / VTT with a file you already have, or press Enter at the playhead to type. Captions YouTube generated for an earlier upload can be downloaded and fixed first; editing YouTube's auto captions walks through that.
3. Read the whole video through. Up and Down step between lines, and the warning markers point at lines that are too fast to read, overlapping or empty.
4. Tick "Show safe area" and check scenes with lower-third name graphics. Nudge the block up where it would cover them.
5. Click Export SRT now if you also want a Studio track, while the text is final.
6. Click Render video, confirm the "Ready to render" summary, keep the tab open, then Download video. Upload the MP4 to YouTube as usual.

The 16:9 frame and the player

The YouTube preset uses Roboto at weight 500, white text on a near-black box at 75% opacity, no outline or shadow, size 5.2, anchored to the bottom with the lines allowed 90% of the safe width. Size is measured against the frame's shorter side, so the text keeps its proportions at 1080p and 4K alike.

For a 16:9 frame the safe-area guide leaves roughly 5% at each side, 6% at the top and 7% at the bottom. The Top and Bottom anchors already measure from that margin, so the guide only makes the boundary visible; it appears in the preview and is never drawn into the video. YouTube puts its progress bar and controls over the lower edge when a viewer pauses or hovers, and end screen elements can occupy the closing seconds, so a small upward nudge often pays off on talky endings.

Rendering keeps the source's resolution, frame rate and orientation, with no cropping or scaling: a 4K master comes back as 4K. Vertical clips for Shorts have their own overlay to worry about; captioning YouTube Shorts handles that format.

Tracks in other languages

Translations here come from the video's speech, not from an existing subtitle file. To build a set of tracks, set "Subtitle language" to the first language, run AI subtitles, review, and Export SRT. Then choose the next language and press "Replace with AI subtitles"; the new lines replace the current ones, so export before you switch. Each run is billed separately: a 12-minute video costs 12 credits (1.2¢) per language.

If you only need the files, translated subtitles produces them without the editor, and the subtitle generator does the same for the spoken language. For a version with a translation in the picture, see burning translated subtitles. The Studio side of uploading is in how to upload an SRT to YouTube, and the YouTube subtitle generator page focuses on producing the file itself.

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