Downloading video and its subtitles

Captions are not inside the video row

When you turn captions on in a player, the words are not coming from the video file. The player is fetching a small text file alongside the picture and drawing the lines on top as it plays. Turn them off and the video is unchanged, because nothing was ever removed from it.

That is why the rows in the results list carry a resolution and a size and say nothing about captions. Each row is a media file the page is serving. The caption text sits outside those files, which is also why a downloaded video can play silently with no words on screen even though the original page showed them.

What a subtitle track actually is

A subtitle track is a plain text file containing numbered lines of dialogue, each with a start time and an end time written in hours, minutes, seconds and fractions. A player reads the clock, finds the line whose window is open, and shows it.

Two formats cover most of what you will meet. SubRip files end in .srt and hold nothing but timings and text. WebVTT files end in .vtt, are used by browsers, and can carry a little positioning information as well. Both are small, usually a few tens of kilobytes for a full-length film, because text weighs almost nothing next to video.

When a source publishes a track and when it does not

Whether captions exist at all is decided by the person who published the video, not by the tool reading the page.

The common situations divide up like this.

• The uploader wrote and attached captions, so a real track exists and matches the speech closely.
• The platform generated captions by machine from the audio, which produces a track with recognisable errors in names and technical words.
• The video is published in several languages, so more than one track exists and the player offers a menu.
• Nobody attached anything, so no track exists and no tool can produce one from the page.
• The video has no speech in it at all, in which case there is nothing to caption.

Burned-in captions travel with the picture

Some publishers draw the words into the frame before uploading, which is common with short social video meant to be watched with the sound off. Those captions are pixels in the picture, exactly like a logo in the corner.

A video with burned-in captions keeps them in every copy, including the one you save here. You cannot switch them off, you cannot change the language, and no page on this site paints them out. On the other hand you never lose them, because they cannot become separated from the video the way a text track can. Play a few seconds of the source to tell the two kinds apart: if the words disappear when you turn captions off in the player, the track is separate.

Putting a video and a track back together after saving

If you have both files, most desktop players will show the words with no configuration at all. Save the video, save the subtitle file, and give the two the same name apart from the extension, so that a film named holiday.mp4 sits next to holiday.srt in the same folder. Open the video and the player finds the track beside it.

Players also accept a track opened by hand from a subtitles menu, which is the route to take when the names do not match or when you have several languages. Phone players vary more than desktop ones, so check yours before you rely on it for something important.

What this page gives you and what free use covers

Paste an address and Analyze lists the media files the page serves, each with a size in megabytes. Pick a row, press Download file, and the video is prepared and transferred to your device. The prepared copy expires on a short timer, so start the transfer while you are looking at the page.

Free use covers 3 downloads a day and any single file up to 150 MB. A feature-length video at a high resolution passes that figure, so either take a lower row or take Pro, which removes the daily count, the size ceiling, and the advertising.

Related pages

• Caption tracks published on YouTube
• Changing a subtitle file between formats
• The spoken text as a transcript
• What the MP4 container holds
• Downloading from any video page