How to Add Captions to a Video

Providing closed captions ensures that your content is accessible to viewers who are deaf or hard of hearing. It also benefits viewers watching in loud environments or those who prefer to consume social media content with their sound muted.

Instead of manually typing out dialogue and trying to sync it to the video timeline in an editing program, the modern workflow relies on automatically generated text files that video players read alongside the video.

The first step is to turn the spoken words in your video into written text.

For a video file, use Konthora's video-to-text converter. It extracts the audio track and creates a speech-to-text transcript. For an audio-only source, use the audio-to-text tool instead.

Before transcribing, you can choose a timestamp mode—such as sentence or paragraph grouping—which dictates how the text will be paced when it finally appears on screen.

Once the transcription is complete, you need to download the text. Video platforms do not accept plain documents like TXT or JSON for closed captions. They require specialized formats that contain precise timing data.

From the export options, select either SRT or VTT. Konthora will instantly generate and download a standalone subtitle file to your computer.

This file acts as a script that tells the video player exactly when to display each line of text.

Konthora does not edit your original video file or permanently burn the text into the image. Instead, you use the subtitle file you just downloaded.

The exported SRT or VTT file can be uploaded or imported into a compatible video platform or editor.

If you are uploading to a major social media platform or dropping the file into a video editor, SRT is the most universally accepted format.

If you are building a custom HTML5 web player for a website, VTT is the modern standard designed specifically for the web.

For a detailed comparison of all available subtitle and transcript formats—including plain TXT and structured JSON—refer to our format guide.