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Practical answers about subtitles and captions — formats, sync, and getting text onto video without a desktop editor.

• Captions vs subtitles: what is the actual difference?

  Captions describe all meaningful audio for viewers who cannot hear it. Subtitles carry the dialogue only. Here is when the distinction matters and when it does not.

• How to add subtitles to a video

  Four ways to subtitle a video — automatically on your phone, in a desktop editor, on YouTube, or by hand — and which one fits your situation.

• How to fix out-of-sync subtitles

  Subtitles out by a constant amount need a shift. Subtitles that drift further out over time need rescaling. Telling them apart is the whole job.

• Open vs closed captions: which should you use?

  Closed captions can be switched off; open captions are burned into the picture. Which one you need depends entirely on where the video is going.

• SRT vs VTT: which subtitle format do you need?

  SRT is what editors and social platforms accept. VTT is what HTML5 video requires. The formats are nearly identical — here is what actually differs.

• What is an SRT file?

  An SRT file is a plain-text list of subtitles with start and end timecodes. Here is the format, how to open one, and what to do when it will not work.