Transcripts and Captions

Transcripts and captions make it easy for viewers to digest the content of your media. They’re a critical part of accessibility, but they are also helpful for longer form and educational content in any language. Wistia captions are also interactive, which means they’re searchable and viewers can jump right to a certain point in the media by clicking on a section of subtitles.

Whether you’re trying to make sure people can get the message of your media (even without the sound), looking to expand your viewer base with multilingual captions, or just searching for a little more love in the media SEO department, they’re a great addition to your content.

Adding Transcripts and Captions To Your Media

If you want to skip writing up your own transcript, scroll below your media to the Transcript section. Select Order Transcript to see the available options.

If you want to automatically order captions and transcripts for all new media uploads, the Account Owner can enable this in their Account Settings. You can learn how to enable this feature on our Account Settings help page.

If you already have a file ready to upload, select the Upload Transcript option. Be sure to format the SRT file or VTT file correctly (feel free to use our guide below!).

Professional Transcripts

The Professional Transcript option is rated at 99% accuracy. The default wait time for the Professional option is 4 business days, with the option to expedite the order and receive it within one business day for an additional cost.

Automated Transcripts

Automated transcripts are rated at 92% accuracy, with the added benefit of being ready in minutes. This purely machine-generated transcript comes at a reduced cost, and is a great way to save time and cost if you don’t mind doing your own review.

We’ll send you an email from alerts@wistia.com to let you know when the transcript is ready!

Setting up Captions on your Media

To enable captions for your video, head to the media page and select the Customize panel. Then, select the Controls tab to enable the captions icon to display in the playbar, and decide whether you’d like captions to be on or off by default.

Once set, the captions button will appear to all viewers who watch your media. The captions will also be injected into the metadata of your media when using the Standard Embed. To learn more about SEO, check out our help page.

In the Transcript section of your media page, click Make Corrections to edit the transcript file. Once edited, click Save.

Click the three dots to select a language, upload a new transcript, delete a transcript, order another transcript, or download a transcript.

Interactive Transcripts

Interactive transcripts allow viewers to navigate to different parts of your media by scrolling through or searching the captions file. Open the captions menu from the play bar and select “Search Video", then search for keywords or phrases to jump to a specific part of the video.

Below a media, the transcript will also highlight each word as it is spoken. Clicking on a specific word will take you to that point in the media.

Multilingual Captions

You can upload as many transcript files as you’d like to your media. To add more files, click the three dots, then Upload Transcript. From here, open up the dropdown menu, or start typing a language to select the appropriate option. Once done, click Upload.

If you’re working with multilingual captions, we’ll supply the captions that match the language of your viewer’s browser. If those captions aren’t available, we’ll serve English captions by default.

SRT Formatting

SRT stands for “SubRip Text,” which is a basic subtitle format. If you’d prefer not to order your captions through us, SRT files can be created and edited using most text editors.

The correct formatting for an SRT file is comprised of four parts:

1. The number for each subtitle (begins with 1).

2. The beginning and ending time for each subtitle, formatted as hours:minutes:seconds,milliseconds, and separated by -->. There should be one space between the starting time and the -->, and one space between the --> and the ending time.

3. The subtitle text. This can be on one or more lines.

4. A blank line before the start of the next subtitle.

Here is an example:

1
00:00:00,500 --> 00:00:03,840
You can add captions in any
language to your Wistia medias.

2
00:00:03,840 --> 00:00:06,337
French, Spanish,
Japanese, Arabic.

3
00:00:06,337 --> 00:00:08,420
When your viewers click
the closed captions button

4
00:00:08,420 --> 00:00:10,711
on the player, they can choose
their preferred language

5
00:00:10,711 --> 00:00:11,800
from a drop-down menu.

6
00:00:11,800 --> 00:00:15,180
Croatian, Czech, Hungarian.

7
00:00:15,180 --> 00:00:17,520
Now your media's message
is accessible to anyone

8
00:00:17,520 --> 00:00:19,004
from anywhere.

9
00:00:19,004 --> 00:00:19,820
Anywhere.

10
00:00:19,820 --> 00:00:22,270
Persian, Latin.

Exporting SRT Files

Now that your captions are formatted correctly, you’ll want to save them as an SRT file.

Here’s how you can save your file as an .srt in TextEdit:

1. Format -> Make Plain Text (or Shift + Command + T)
2. File -> Save
3. Name your file and edit the extension to be .srt

Once you save your file with the .srt extension, you’ll be good to go!

VTT Formatting

VTT stands for “Video Text Tracks.” The first line of a VTT file needs to be “WEBVTT” and the formatting is similar to an SRT file.

The beginning and ending time for each subtitle needs to be formatted as hours:minutes:seconds,milliseconds, and separated by -->. There should be one space between the starting time and the -->, and one space between the --> and the ending time. Then comes the subtitle text, which can be one or more lines, then a blank line before the start of the next subtitle.

Exporting VTT Files

Here’s how you can save your file as a .vtt in TextEdit:

1. Format -> Make Plain Text (or Shift + Command + T)
2. File -> Save
3. Name your file and edit the extension to be .vtt

Troubleshooting

SRT and VTT files need to follow the above formatting exactly, otherwise the upload to Wistia will fail.

Here are some common issues that can occur:

• Captions are formatted correctly, but still getting rejected. You might have an em-dash! An em-dash ( — ) can sometimes be inserted by word processors if you double tap the hyphen key (-). Depending on your text editor’s font, a timing arrow with an em dash can look identical to a correctly formatted one.

  Here’s a quick example: --> , can actually be — -> !

  You can check for these by pasting a sample time stamp into another text field. These are also easier to pick up on with an automated captions checker.

• Special characters are displaying as � � � instead. The solution to this is to encode your SRT files as UTF-8. Sometimes they’ll be exported in other encodings like UTF-16.

• File is encoded in UTF-8 and is being rejected. If everything else is in order, check to be sure that your file is encoded in UTF-8, and not UTF-8 with BOM. A Byte Order Mark (BOM) is a special character that can get inserted at the start of certain text files, and can sometimes be hard to detect since it’s not visible in most editors.

Familiar with using command line applications via your computer’s terminal? If so, you can use the handy tool Subcheck to scan whole SRT files for errors. It can even make automatic adjustments to the file!

If you’re having trouble working out the exact issue with a file, you can always reach out to our Support Team for assistance!