Guide
How to add subtitles to a video
Subtitles make a video watchable with the sound off, which is how most social video is watched, and they make it accessible to viewers who are deaf or hard of hearing. Most online tools transcribe your video on their servers. bruhgrow runs the speech recognition on your own computer, lets you fix the text, and saves either a subtitled MP4 or a plain SRT or VTT file.
Steps
- 1Open Add subtitles and drop your video or audio file.
- 2Pick the spoken language, or leave it on auto-detect.
- 3Press Transcribe. The first time, a speech model is downloaded and cached; after that it works offline. Transcription runs on your device.
- 4Read through the lines. Click any line to fix a word or adjust its timing.
- 5Choose an output: Burn in to write the subtitles into the picture, or SRT / VTT to save a subtitle file you can upload separately.
- 6Save the result.
Burned-in or separate file?
Burned-in (open) captions are part of the picture: they show everywhere, including Instagram, TikTok and WhatsApp, and viewers cannot turn them off. A separate SRT or VTT file is better for YouTube, Vimeo and most video players: viewers can toggle them, search engines can read them, and you can offer several languages. If in doubt, save both.
Getting a better transcript
- Clear audio helps most. If the recording is quiet, run Normalize audio first.
- Pick the language explicitly for short clips; auto-detect needs a few seconds of speech.
- Names and technical terms are the usual mistakes. Search the transcript for them and fix them once.
- Keep lines short. Two lines of about 40 characters each read well on a phone.
How long does it take?
Transcription speed depends on your computer. A recent laptop handles a 10-minute video in a couple of minutes. Burning the subtitles in re-encodes the video, which takes roughly as long as the video itself at 1080p.
Privacy
Interviews, internal meetings and unreleased content never leave your computer. The speech model runs in the browser via WebAssembly and the video is re-encoded locally. Every tool runs in your browser, so your files never leave your computer.
Questions
- Which languages are supported?
- The Whisper model recognizes many languages. Accuracy is highest for English and other widely spoken languages with clear audio.
- Can I translate the subtitles?
- Not in this tool. Save the SRT, translate the text, and burn in or upload the translated file.
- Does the subtitle file work on YouTube?
- Yes. Upload the SRT in YouTube Studio under Subtitles.
Tools for this
More guides
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- How to compress a video for emailGmail and Outlook cap attachments at around 20 to 25 MB. Here is how to compress a video to fit, and when a link is the better choice.
- How to remove silence from a videoCut pauses, dead air and gaps out of a recording automatically, by loudness, with natural padding. Works for video and audio, on your device.
- How to extract audio from a videoPull the soundtrack out of an MP4, MOV, WebM or MKV as MP3, M4A or WAV, in your browser, without uploading the video.