Closed captions

Captions the viewer can turn on or off. Open captions are burned into the picture and cannot be switched off.

Also called: CC, open captions, burned-in captions

Closed versus open

Closed captions ride in a separate track. The player draws them. The viewer can hide them, change the size, or pick another language. Open captions are pixels in the video. They survive a mute, and they also survive every export, whether you want them or not.

YouTube's CC button reads a closed track. A thumbnail or a Short with words painted on the picture is using open captions for those words.

What an extractor can reach

An extractor can only read a closed track. Burned-in words are part of the image. No caption endpoint will return them. If a video has open captions and no closed track, the honest transcript tool returns a miss.

If you need those words, you either type them or run optical character recognition on frames. That is outside what a caption extractor does.

Related

FAQ

Questions, answered.

What is closed captions?

Captions the viewer can turn on or off. Open captions are burned into the picture and cannot be switched off.

How does it show up on YouTube?

Closed captions ride in a separate track. The player draws them. The viewer can hide them, change the size, or pick another language. Open captions are pixels in the video. They survive a mute, and they also survive every export, whether you want them or not.

Which YouTubeScribe tools use this?

Start with transcript-generator, subtitle-downloader.