How to Set the Position of Subtitles on YouTube


There are two ways to manipulate the position of subtitles on over 1.6 million videos that have been uploaded on YouTube with subtitles. (Oh, and the 135 Million that have been automatically captioned by Google). As a viewer you have the option of dragging the captions to any part of the screen. As a channel owner, you’re now able to set the position of the manual subtitles that you upload with your videos. Let me get into details.

How to Set the Position of Subtitles while Viewing a YouTube Video

You need to first click on the red CC button red rectangle on the bottom right hand corner of the viewer window on YouTube. If you can’t see the red CC button red rectangle, the video DOES NOT have manual or automatic YouTube subtitles. You can easily ensure that all the videos you’re watching have subtitles by adding “, cc” [comma][space][cc] to any search, or after searching, click CC filter to only see results with subtitles.

Once you’ve clicked on the red CC button red rectangle, a dialog box will appear where you can choose the subtitles track that you want. You can also translate the subtitles to another language, using Googgle’s machine translate. Once you’ve selected the subtitle track, the chosen subtitles will appear on the screen. It’s then very easy for you to drag them to any part of the screen that suits your needs. Another great tip is to use the – and + keyboard keys to decrease or increase subtitles text size respectively.

How to Set the Position of YouTube Subtitles when Uploading Videos

Since March 1st 2012, content creators/channel owners have been able to set the position of subtitles on their YouTube videos. Before then, all subtitles were rendered at the bottom of the screen, by default, irrespective of their placement. YouTube now supports subtitle placement. This means that you’re now able to place text near the character who is speaking, italicize subtitles to indicate an off-camera narrator, or even have scrolling captions. This is a really useful feature, particularly if you have text embedded at the bottom of your screen that you don’t want to be obscured by the subtitles.

All you’ll need to do is set the position of each subtitle using your subtitling program of choice and then upload the subtitles with your video. Furthermore, you are no longer restricted to only importing in .SRT format. You can import caption files in .SCC, .CAP, EBU-STL, and other formats. With our professional subtitling services, we’ll set the position of the subtitles for you and also get them to you in a variety of formats: at a price that won’t break the bank!

I’ll leave you with a quote from Ken Harrenstien, the technical lead on the YouTube captioning project at Google. Harrenstien, who is deaf, said that accurately captioned videos get “many, many more views globally.”


2 responses to “How to Set the Position of Subtitles on YouTube”

  1. Toussaint Houle Avatar
    Toussaint Houle

    Interesting content on the other hand I would like to explain to you that I think there is trouble with your RSS feeds when they appear to not be working for me. Might be just me but I was thinking I would suggest it.

    1. Kongo Avatar
      Kongo

      Hey Toussaint, glad you like the post. I did test the RSS 2.0 feed and it’s working. What the specific problem or error you got?

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