How to Add Closed Captions or Subtitles to Facebook Videos: New Feature

If you’re a Facebook user, you’re probably familiar with the video features they’ve been adding. Most notably, you’re probably familiar with Facebook’s auto-play feature, in which video starts playing automatically when it scrolls onto your screen. However, when the video plays, it plays with no audio unless you click on the video and leave your newsfeed.

Facebook Launches Closed Captioning Feature for Video

Without any announcement whatsoever, Facebook has launched the ability to add closed captions to your videos, which solves the problem of auto-playing a silent video. How many times have you started watching a video on Facebook in a location where you can’t play the sound (office, subway, library) and wished that you could understand what was going on? Well, now you can! Of course, closed captions will also make your videos accessible to people who are deaf or hard-of-hearing, and to people who know English as a second language.

How to Add Closed Captions to Facebook Videos

It’s really easy to add closed captions to your videos on Facebook! First, you’ll need to download an SRT caption file for your video. You can do that from your 3Play Media account. Just upload your video and submit it for captioning, and you’ll get an email when it’s finished processing. Select your file and select Download, then choose the SRT caption file format.

Once your caption file has downloaded, you’ll need to re-name the file according to Facebook’s rules. Your captions won’t work unless the name is in the following format: yourfilename.en_US.srt.

Upload your video to Facebook. When the video is done processing, click the Edit Video prompt to add captions. In the caption field, click Choose File and select your SRT file.

Remember to save your changes, and view your Facebook video with captions!