What Are Burned-In Captions?
Burned-in captions, also called open or hardcoded captions, are part of the video picture itself, so everyone sees them and no viewer can turn them off.
A caption file such as SRT or VTT stays apart from the video and the player draws it; burned-in captions are drawn into every frame when the video is made. They look the same on every phone and platform, with sound on or off, and can be styled with any font, colour or word-by-word highlight.
Most short videos use them because many people scroll with the sound off and the platforms’ own automatic captions vary. The cost is that they cannot be edited after export, turned off, or switched to another language, and search engines cannot read them as text, so a caption file is still worth uploading where the platform takes one.
For a creator, place burned-in captions inside the safe zone, above the bottom third where the app’s own caption and buttons sit, and use only one kind per video, or the same words appear twice.
How to add captions to TikTok, Reels and Shorts
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