How do you call video subtitles that can’t be turn off?

Video subtitles that can’t be turn off are called open captions.

The opposite is close captions. Close captions are the subtitles that can be turned off. The term "closed" (versus "open") indicates that the captions are usually not visible until activated by the viewer. Close captions are also known as Soft subtitles or softsubs.

Open captions are also called hard subtitles or hardsubs. With hard subtitles, the subtitle text is irreversibly merged in the original video frames.

Which type of captions should you add to your video? What are their benefits and their drawbacks?

Closed Captions are the most common kind of captions, used by major video streaming website like YouTube.

Usually identified by a [CC] symbol in the corner of the screen, closed captions exist as a separate file, allowing the viewer to switch them on or off.

The major benefit of closed captions is their flexibility. They can be edited easily because they are in a separate file.

But closed captions will only work if the platform supports closed caption files.

They also only work if the viewer understands how to turn the captions on and off, so they are not the best option if you want a simple way to watch the videos with subtitles.

Open captions are permanently visible in the video. The viewer does not switch anything on to see them.

A great benefit of open captions is that the style of the captions can be determined ahead of time. That means you can choose the font color and size for your captions before embedding them in the video.

Open captions are a good option if you don’t want to rely on the viewer’s technical ability to display the subtitles.

The main drawback is that open captions are embedded directly into the video stream, making it impossible for viewers to turn them off if they don’t want to see them.

How to choose between open or close captions?

It depends of the goal of your video. If you think the subtitles really help to understand the content of your video, it’s better to use open captions.

That’s why open captions are a good option for video marketing and video-based learning.

For example, it’s useful to read the subtitle of a technical tutorial on YouTube.

Close captions are the easiest to create. To automatically create these subtitles, you can check the website rollideo.com.

Rollideo can turn any text into a video with the accurate subtitles. It generates videos with open captions.