Youtube users now add Subtitles and Captions to their Videos on Youtube . Adding captions and Subtitles is optional but adding subtitle and captions to YouTube video make your videos available to as many people as possible.Captions and subtitles make videos accessible to a wider audience by allowing people who cannot otherwise understand the audio track to follow, especially those who are hard of hearing or speak other languages.

How do I add or edit captions/subtitles?

To add captions or subtitles to one of your videos, you’ll need to have files with the captions/subtitles in them. You can purchase software to let you create these files or ask other companies to do this for you, often for a small fee.At the moment, each file can only contain one caption/subtitle track in a single language. To add multiple language tracks to a single video, please upload each file separately for that video.

Once you have the files, log in to your YouTube account to upload them:

  1. Click the "My Account" link in the upper right-hand corner of every page.
  2. Click "My Videos". You will go to a page showing your uploaded videos.
  3. Find the video to add captions/subtitles to, then click the Video name or thumbnail image.
  4. Scroll down to the "Captions and Subtitles" section (bottom left).
  5. Upload your captions/subtitles file!


To learn more about the information in each captions/subtitles file, read below.

We currently support a simple subtitle format that is compatible with the formats known as SubViewer (*.SUB) and SubRip (*.SRT). Although you can upload your captions/subtitles in any format, only supported formats will be displayed properly on the playback page.

The supported format consists of text divided into separate caption (or subtitle) segments in chronological order. Each caption must have three parts:

  • A timecode
  • The caption text
  • A blank line


Timecode: Specifies when the caption should be shown and for how long.

Time is measured from the start of the video in these units:

  • HH - Hours, starting at 00
  • MM - Minutes (00-59)
  • SS - Seconds (00-59)
  • FS - Fractional Seconds (0-999)


We support these timecode constructs:

  • HH:MMS.FS,HH:MMS.FS - Caption display starts at the first time and stops at the second time. This is compatible with the SubViewer format.
  • HH:MMS,FS –> HH:MMS,FS - Caption display starts at the first time and stops at the second time. For complete compatibility with the SubRip format, a "subtitle number" can also precede this timecode.
  • HH:MMS.FS - Caption display starts at this time, but no stop time is defined. We’ll try to work out an appropriate stop time.


Caption text: One or more lines of text. This text must be UTF-8 encoded so that any language can be supported.

Blank line: A blank line is used to mark the end of each caption.

Examples:

  • 0:01:23.000,0:01:25.000
  • Text shown at 1 minute 23 seconds into the video, for 2 seconds
  • 0:02:20.250,0:02:23.8
  • Text shown at 2 min 20.25 sec, until 2 min 23.8 sec
  • 0:03:14.159


Text shown at 3 min 14.159 sec for an undefined length of time.
If your uploaded captions/subtitles are not available for online playback after a few hours, they may be in a format we don’t yet support or there may be something wrong with your encoding.