Add closed captions

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The legacy captions editor will be deprecated on 13 January 2025 and is no longer supported. Please use the updated captions editor in the dashboard.

The JW Platform allows you to add captions or subtitles to your video content.

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

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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, you can either add a side-loaded caption file or create a caption track in the JWP dashboard.

Add a side-loaded caption file to your video

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

Follow these steps to add side-loaded captions:

1. From the Media Library, select a video. The media details page appears.
2. 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 or .srt files from your computer. Once uploaded and processed, the captions appear in the Captions Tracks panel in a Published state.

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   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, select a video. The media details page appears.
2. 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.
   

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   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.
    

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    Click ▶ in the preview player to preview the captions.

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

Embedded captions

Follow this step to add a video with embedded captions:

1. Register your video.

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   In step 4, select Register only 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.