Glossary → Captions & subtitles
Captions & subtitles
Open captions
Open captions are permanently burned into the video image — every viewer sees them, no player support is needed, and they cannot be turned off.
Social video made open captions mainstream: autoplay-muted feeds mean the first seconds must work silently. The trade-off is permanence — one style, one language, and re-rendering the video to change anything.
Related terms
Burned-in captionsBurned-in (or hardcoded) captions are rendered into the video frames themselves during export, becoming pixels…
Closed captionsClosed captions are timed text that can be turned on or off by the viewer, written for deaf and hard-of-hearin…
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