Automatically Generate or Edit a VTT file
Closed captions are essential for posting engaging videos on social media. With Kapwing’s Subtitle Editor, generate a transcription using AI technology in seconds. Then, download the file in the VTT format (short for “Web Video Text Tracks”) to publish on a native video player like YouTube, Instagram, or another social media platform.
Rather than manually editing a VTT file in your desktop text editor, creators can make changes to each line of text and its timings while previewing the subtitles on their video. Upgrade to download your captions as VTT or SRT files or embed the captions directly into your video for free.
Kapwing’s automatic VTT file maker uses an advanced speech recognition API to convert the video to text. It also has intuitive design tools to format and style the caption text and process the video in the cloud.
How to Make and Edit a VTT File for a Video
- Upload VideoUpload the video that you want to add captions to. Trim and edit the video inline.
- Generate, Type, or Import SubtitlesUse Kapwing’s smart technology to auto-generate subtitles on your video. Or, type them manually. Then, adjust the text and timing to make the captions perfect.
- Download VTT FileFind the “Download VTT” option in the left-hand column to get the transferable web text track file for social media.
What is a VTT File?
VTT files are useful when uploading Closed Captions to social media platforms. Some websites, like Articulate 360, only support VTT files while other websites only support SRT files. LinkedIn and YouTube’s video viewers support both SRT and VTT files for captioning. In most cases, these captions will only appear when the user clicks the “CC” button in the viewer — if you want the text to appear for every viewer, you have to add Open Captions instead. Most hosting platforms have a space to upload a subtitle file before you publish, then display the subtitles within the native video viewer depending on the user’s settings.
Subtitles make videos on social media more engaging for people with the sound off and more accessible to people with hearing disabilities. If you have multiple audiences who speak different languages, you might want to upload a VTT to the platform instead of burning the text directly into the video so that different languages appear for different viewers.
Use Kapwing’s VTT file editor to avoid this finicky formatting and reduce the high cost of ordering caption files for every video you make. Kapwing’s platform allows you to generate or type out subtitles, time them out against the video, and then download a new updated VTT file. This editor makes it much easier to listen to the video and create an VTT file to match the audio track or automatically extract the subtitles from the video’s audio track.
If you have a Kapwing Pro Workspace, you can now download your subtitles as a VTT file. Just open the subtitle maker, generate or type out the text, adjust the timings, and click the “Download VTT" button in the left column.
If you want to get the VTT file for videos that you’ve already created, just click “Edit” to go back to the subtitle editor and download the VTT file retroactively. We hope that this new functionality makes it easier for Kapwing Pro customers to produce captioned social media videos at scale.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What is the timestamp formatting for a VTT file?
What’s the difference between an SRT and VTT file?
How do I order a VTT file?
What's different about Kapwing?
Kapwing is free to use for teams of any size. We also offer paid plans with additional features, storage, and support.
