Burned-in captions or uploaded subtitles?

Captions burned into the picture are part of the video file. Subtitles uploaded alongside it are a separate track the player draws. They look similar to a viewer and behave completely differently.

What burned-in captions give you

• They always appear, on every platform, whether or not the viewer has captions switched on.
• You control exactly how they look — size, position, timing, which word is emphasised.
• They survive being downloaded and re-uploaded.

And what they cost: they cannot be turned off, they cannot be translated, and a screen reader cannot read them. They are pixels, not text.

What uploaded subtitles give you

• A viewer can switch them off, or have them on by default from their own settings.
• Platforms can translate them, which opens the clip to audiences who do not speak the language.
• They are machine-readable, which makes the video's content searchable and indexable.

And what they cost: many viewers never see them, because they never turn them on. On a silent autoplaying feed, a subtitle track that is off by default is the same as no captions at all.

The practical answer

For short-form vertical clips, burn them in. The feed autoplays silently, the viewer has not opted into anything, and a caption that might not appear is not worth having. This is why every clip you see on TikTok has words on the picture.

For long-form video on YouTube or a site, upload a subtitle track. Viewers there are watching deliberately, often with sound, and the searchability is worth real traffic.

Why not both

You can. Burn captions into the clip and also upload the transcript as a subtitle file. The burned words serve the scroller, the track serves accessibility and translation. It costs one extra upload step and there is no downside beyond that.

The part people get wrong

Auto-generated platform captions are not the same as either. They are generated after upload, you do not control their timing or appearance, and they are frequently wrong on names and jargon — which is exactly the vocabulary that makes your clip worth watching. If the words matter, do not leave them to the platform.