The opposite of burned-in captions is this file, not 'no captions.' A closed-caption track rides next to the picture as SubRip (.srt), WebVTT (.vtt) or a platform-native caption asset. The player composites it at playback. That is why a YouTube viewer can turn captions off, pick a language, and see a look YouTube chose rather than the one in your edit.
Short-form almost never wants this. A muted autoplay feed will not enable a track the viewer never asked for, and the caption's type, colour and position are part of the cut, not a preference. Burn-in is the format those platforms actually play. Closed captions remain the right object for long-form YouTube, courses, broadcast deliverables, and any master you still expect to restyle or translate without re-rendering pixels.
SDH is a flavour of closed captions, not a competing format: the same sidecar idea, with non-speech audio described. Forced narrative is the other sibling — only the lines a viewer in the original language still needs, burned or sidecared onto a foreign-language master. On Versely the generator burns captions into the MP4; sidecar conversion is a free-tool job when a client asks for a .srt or .vtt next to the file.
In practice
- Ship burn-in for Reels, TikTok, Shorts and ads; ship a sidecar for YouTube long-form and course players.
- Do not upload an SRT and assume a Reel will show it. The feed will not.
- If the client needs both, render the burned file and export the transcript as a sidecar rather than treating one as the other.
The mistake to avoid
Delivering a sidecar and calling the job captioned for short-form. A file the player can hide is not on screen in a muted feed.
Where you will run into it
- Add Captions to a Video — Speech in, styled subtitles out — no manual timing.
- AI Caption Generator — Drop a video, get timed captions. Free, on your device, no upload.
Related terms
Burned-in captions
Burned-in captions meaning: subtitles rendered into pixels, so viewers cannot turn them off or lose them on re-upload. Closed captions are a separate track.
WebVTT
WebVTT is the web-native caption file: a .vtt sidecar with cues, timestamps, and optional positioning and styling the player may honour.
SRT
SRT is the simplest caption sidecar: numbered cues, start and end times with a comma decimal, and plain text. No styling, no positioning.
SDH
SDH is a caption track that includes speech and non-speech audio — [door slams], [music], speaker IDs — so the file is usable without sound.
Forced narrative
Forced narrative captions only translate what a same-language viewer still cannot read — a sign, a letter, foreign speech — not the whole dialogue.
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