Subtitle Burner

Soft subtitles — an SRT sidecar, a YouTube caption track, an MKV subtitle stream — are separate data the player renders on top of the video. They're editable, toggleable and searchable, which makes them the right choice for YouTube uploads, streaming platforms and anything where viewers might want another language. But they only work when the player bothers to load them, and most social feeds don't.

Burned-in captions are pixels. They survive every platform, every re-upload, every screen recording and every messaging app that strips metadata — the reason 85% of social video is watched with sound off, and the reason creators burn captions into Reels, TikToks and Shorts rather than trusting platform auto-captions. The trade-off is permanence: you can't fix a typo without re-exporting, and viewers can't turn them off. So the workflow that avoids regret is simple — finalize your timing and text first (our Subtitle Editor exists for exactly this), then burn. GIFs are the extreme case — they have no caption track at all — so if a captioned clip is headed for GIF duty, burn first, then follow our guide to making a GIF from a video clip for the size settings.

A word on honesty about this tool's export: there is no magic "instant" burn. Real caption burning is a re-encode — each frame must be decoded, drawn on, and re-compressed — and doing it in a browser means real time: your video plays through once while the frames are captured. Paid desktop encoders do the same work faster with hardware acceleration; what you get here instead is zero cost, zero upload of your footage, and styling control that free online burners usually lock behind a subscription. Keep the tab focused during export, and for videos over ten minutes consider splitting into parts first.