Step One

Choose your adventure!

There are a bunch of different ways to “add subtitles” to a video. Listed below are the different things that people mean when they talk about adding subtitles to a video. Choose the one that most closely matches what you’re trying to do.

Path #1: I have a video that I want to write subtitles for.

This is often referred to as transcribing a video. Sometimes the video already has subtitles but they’re in a different language, so you actually need to translate the subtitles for the video. In either case, you start with a video and you end up with an additional set of subtitles for that video.

Creating subtitles for a video can be easy and fun if you have a good app for it. Creating a subtitle file manually is very labor intensive. An app like Subtitled Pro can save you lots of time.

Once you have subtitles, you can do one of three things: 1) download and share those subtitles as a file, 2) hard code them into the pixels of the video — this is often called “burning in” the subtitles, or 3) include the subtitles in the video as closed captioning — this is often referred to as “soft coding” the subtitles.

Path #2: I have a video and I want to edit the subtitles in it.

When a video already has subtitles, you can use software like Subtitled Pro to edit them.

If the subtitles have been “burnt in” (also called “hard-coded), you can't edit them. In that case, they are permanently encoded into the pixels of the video.

As long as the subtitles haven't been burnt in, you can edit them. You can tell the difference by whether or not the video player gives to a “CC” button to turn on Closed Captions. If you see subtitles, but there's no option to turn them on or off, most likely they've been hard coded / burnt in.

If you are able to edit your videos subtitles you'll need special software (like Subtitled Pro) to extract the subtitles into an editable format. The most popular format is SRT or SubRip subtitles. This is a great format for beginners because it's super simple, but there are many formats.

Importantly, editing the subtitles in a video is only half the problem. Once you've edited them, you need to update the video file to include the new subtitles. This requires special software, like Subtitled Pro. Using an app like Subtitled Pro, you can edit and the re-apply you subtitles as Closed Captions in a video file. Or you can download and share the subtitles you extracted from the video.

Path #3: I have a video and I want to burn subtitles into it.

Here you've got an existing video file and you have subtitles for it and you want to re-encode the video with those subtitles included in the video data — “burned in” to the actual pixels of the video. For this, you need special software like Subtitled Pro to export the video with the subtitle data included in the video directly.