Captions (subtitles) are available on videos where the owner has added them and on some videos where YouTube automatically provides them. You can change the default settings for captions on your computer or mobile device.
You can change how your captions look, what language they're in and more.
Turn captions on or off
- Go to the video.
- If captions are available the icon will be visible on the player.
- To turn captions on, tap .
- To turn captions off, tap again.
Turn default setting to on or off
- Go to your Account Settings page.
- Select Playback from the left-hand menu.
- Tick or untick Always show captions.
- Tick Show automatic captions by speech recognition (when available) to enable automatic captions for videos that don't already have captions provided.
- Click Save.
Adjust default size and style of captions
Adjust default caption size & style
- Go to video player.
- Click settings
- Select Subtitles/CC.
- Click Options to customise:
- Font, colour, opacity and size.
- Background colour and opacity.
- Window colour and opacity.
- Character edge style.
Note: These will be your default captions format settings until you change them again or click Reset to go back to the default captions format.
Caption shortcuts
You can use keyboard shortcuts to quickly adjust caption formatting while watching your video. Make sure that you click inside the video player before using keyboard shortcuts.
- '+' makes the captions bigger
- '-' makes the captions smaller
Select caption language
Choose different caption languages by clicking the captions icon on a video. If the language isn't listed, you can select the option for auto-translated captions, which are translated using Google Translate.
- Click the settings icon at the bottom of the video screen.
- Click Subtitles/CC.
- Click Auto-translate.
- Select a language.
View captions transcript
For videos with captions provided by the owner, you can view the full captions transcript and jump to specific parts of the video.
- Underneath the video player, click More.
- Select the transcript icon
. As you watch the video, the transcript will scroll to always show you the current text.
- Click on any line of caption text to jump to that part of the video.
. As you watch the video, the transcript will scroll to always show you the current text.
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