Add closed captions

If you have captions or subtitles for your video content, you can use your JWP dashboard to add side-loaded captions.

In addition to providing your viewers with text that explains the audio aspects of your video content, adding captions to your online video content can provide several additional benefits:

• Improved video SEO
• Increased content retention
• Increased engagement with autoplay content
• Environment-independent content viewing
• Legal compliance

🔑

If you are a developer or have developer resources you can add captions directly in the player code.

Side-loaded captions

To add side-loaded captions to a video in your JWP dashboard, you either add a side-loaded caption file to your video or create a caption track for your video from within the dashboard.

Add a side-loaded caption file to your video

🚧

The JW Platform does not validate caption files on upload. Make sure to validate your .vtt files before uploading.

1. From your JWP dashboard Media Library, click the name of the video.
2. On right side of the page beneath the preview player, click the Tracks tab.
3. In the Captions section, click Manage. The Captions Tracks panel appears.
4. Click Upload. The file picker appears.
5. Select one or several .vtt files from your computer. Once uploaded and processed, the captions appear in the Captions Tracks panel in a Published state.

   📘

   JWP uses the name of the caption file as the track label that a viewer will see in the player's caption menu.

6. Click Close.

Create a caption track for your video

Follow these steps to create a caption track:

1. From the Media Library, click the name of the video. The media details page appears.
2. On the right side of the page beneath the preview player, click the Tracks tab.
3. In the Captions section, click Manage. The Captions Tracks panel appears.
4. Click Create. The track creation page appears.
5. Enter the name of the caption track.
6. Click Set Language Code. The Language Code popup appears.
7. Enter the language code for the captions.
   

   💡

   By right-clicking View List of Codes > Open Link in a New Tab, a list of all the acceptable language code values will appear in a new tab.

8. In the top timecode field, set the start time in HH:MM:SS.mmm format. This is the point at which the caption should first appear on screen.
9. In the bottom timecode field, set the end time in HH:MM:SS.mmm format. This is the point at which the caption should disappear.
10. In the caption text box, enter the text of the caption.
11. Click Save.
    

    💡

    Click ▶ in the preview player to preview the captions.

12. (Optional) Click + to add another caption. The timecode fields and textbox appear.
13. (Optional) Repeat steps 8-11 to add another caption.

Change the status of a side-loaded caption

By default, JWP publishes processed captions associated with a media item.

Use the following steps to change the publish status of caption:

1. From your JWP dashboard Media Library, click the name of the video. The details page for the video appears.
2. On right side of the page beneath the preview player, click the Tracks tab.
3. In the Captions section, click Manage. The Captions Tracks panel appears.
4. Hover over the caption track row, click ⋯ > Unpublish. The caption track is unpublished and placed into a Draft state.

📘

If the track is already in the Draft state, the caption track is in an unpublished state. Hover over the caption track row, click ⋯ > Publish. The caption track is published.

Embedded captions

Add a video with embedded captions

1. Register your videos.
2. In step 3, be sure to select No, don't host media on import when registering your videos. If video content with embedded captions is uploaded to your JWP account, the embedded captions may be removed during the transcoding process.