Subtitles and Closed Captions

SproutVideo offers the ability to display subtitles along with videos. We currently support subtitles using the WebVTT and SRT standard. We do not support the entire standard but if you have any questions about our implementation or what we do and do not support, please contact our support team.

How to Enable Subtitles and Closed Captions

Go to the video for which you’d like to add subtitles, then expand the ‘Additional Video Settings’ section, and click on the ‘Manage Subtitles’ button:

Click the ‘+ New Track’ button:

Select the language for the subtitle track, click ‘Choose A File’, then select the WebVTT or SRT file on your computer and click open. Once the file is selected click ‘Add Subtitle Track’:

Your video will now display the subtitle button in the video player and viewers will be able to select the subtitle track when watching the video.

How to Set a Default Subtitle Track

By setting a default subtitle track, your viewers will see the subtitles appear automatically in the player.

Once the subtitle track has been uploaded, you can enable a default subtitle track by clicking the toggle switch for the language you wish to display.

The WebVTT Standard

We chose the WebVTT standard because it is starting to become widely adopted by all of the major web browsers for HTML5 subtitle and captioning support and provides a simple, extensible, and human-readable format on which to build timed text tracks. The WebVTT format is very simple. A WebVTT file must start with the header “WEBVTT”. After that it is followed by one or more “cues”. At it’s simplest, a cue consists of a “timing” and “cue text”. Here is an example:

WEBVTT

00:00:01.000 --> 00:00:10.000
This is the first line of text, displaying from 1-10 seconds

00:00:15.000 --> 00:00:20.000
And the second line of text, appearing from 15-20 seconds

For the complete WebVTT standard, click here.

Device Support

Subtitles are supported on all devices when using the Adobe Flash video player. The HTML5 player supports subtitles in the following environments:

• Internet Explorer 10+
• Edge 12+
• Firefox 38+
• Google Chrome 31+
• Safari 8+
• Opera 32+
• iOS Safari 8.4+
• Android: 4.4+
• Google Chrome for Android: 45+