Definition
VideoText editorial team. Updated September 13, 2026.
Open captions are timed text burned into the video frames. Viewers cannot turn them off. They are also called hardcoded or burned-in captions.
The sections below explain how open captions is used in transcription and subtitle work, what people often mix up, and which VideoText workflow applies when the next step is a file or review pass.
Silent autoplay, venues without caption decoders, or a requirement that every viewer see the same words. The tradeoff is that you cannot restyle or translate the track without re-exporting the video.
Open captions are rendered into the picture itself, so every viewer sees them and no player setting can turn them off. The trade is control: you choose exactly how they look and where they sit, and nothing about the playback environment can change it.
Because they are part of the image, they cannot be edited after the fact without re-encoding, and they cannot be replaced with another language. Each language version becomes a separate video file.
Social platforms are the main case. Much of the audience watches with sound off, autoplay begins muted, and not every platform surfaces a caption toggle, so a burned-in track is the only way to guarantee the text is seen.
The cost is accessibility and flexibility: a viewer cannot resize the text, a screen reader cannot read it, and search engines cannot index it. For a library intended to last, a sidecar caption file is usually the better deliverable.
