add subtitles to your videos

How To Add Subtitles and Translations to Your Videos

There are a lot of reasons to add subtitles to a video:

They make the video accessible to people who are deaf or hard of hearing

They make it easier to track and understand the lyrics if it's a music video

They offer an alternative to posting lyrics alongside the video of a music video

They provide the opportunity to translate your video into any language

Fortunately, it's quite easy to subtitle a video. There are many different ways to do it, but perhaps the easiest is to use the handy tools at DotSub. One of the advantages of DotSub is that you can time each lyric to appear exactly when you want it to, so they can come in on the beat if you're making a music video and be fully integrated with the vid's aesthetics. And if you mark your video as "public", other DotSub users can add translations in any language, which is really pretty cool.

Creating the Subtitles

Register with DotSub and upload your video there.

Follow the tutorial to add timestamped subtitles to your video in any language. This is super-super easy and it only takes about 10 minutes to subtitle a 3-minute video.

Mark your translation/subtitles as complete. You can then test them on DotSub.

If you want to use DotSub as your video host, you're done. Link to the video there, or use DotSub's embed code to embed the video wherever you want.

If you want to add the subtitles to your videos on other streaming services or for download, read on.

Add Subtitles to Videos on Other Streaming Hosts

At the end of the subtitle creation process above, DotSub provides you with a SubRip subtitle file (.srt). This file can be used on a number of different streaming sites, including YouTube and Blip.tv. It can also be offered for download along with a video. The .srt file can also be used to create a subtitle track for a DVD.

Add subtitles to a video on Blip.tv:

Download the .srt file from DotSub.

Upload your video to Blip.tv. When configuring your upload, click "Add additional format/captioning", browse to select your .srt file, and select the language from the drop-down.

Upload the .srt file.

Done! You can now use Blip's embed code to have your subtitled video appear wherever you want — your journal, your website, etc. Clicking the "CC" icon in the Blip.tv player turns the subtitles on.

Add subtitles to a video on YouTube:

Download the .srt file from DotSub.

Upload your video to YouTube. When configuring your upload, click "Captions".

Click "Add a Caption Track" and browse to select your .srt file. Select the language from the drop-down, and make sure "Caption file" is selected, not "Transcript file".

Upload the .srt file.

Done! You can now use YouTube's embed code to have your subtitled video appear wherever you want — your journal, your website, etc. Clicking the "CC" icon in the YouTube player turns the subtitles on.

The process is similar for many other streaming sites.

Offer Subtitles for Downloaded Videos

VLC will play a video with subtitles as long as the video file and the subtitle file are in the same directory (folder).

Download the .srt file from DotSub.

Rename the .srt file so it has the exact same name as your video. For instance, "MyVideo.avi" and "MyVideo.srt".

Make a folder with both files in it.

Use Win-Zip or the Mac OS's "Make archive" feature to make a .zip archive of the folder.

Offer this .zip file for download, and you're done. You may want to provide instructions to viewers about keeping the two files together.

Alternatives to DotSub

Captioning is taking off and there are now several alternatives to DotSub. The best seems to be Universal Subtitles, which works the same way as DotSub but has a better interface. However, with Universal Subtitles one does not necessarily need to re-upload the video.