Add Text to Video
Add Text to Video overlays a caption on your clip — a title, a subtitle, a call-out or a watermark. Choose where it sits, how big it is, its colour, and whether it has an outline or a background plate for readability over busy footage. A live preview shows the caption in place, and the export burns it into every frame, all in your browser.
Add your video
The file is read by your browser and stays on your device — there is no upload step.
Your video
The work runs in this tab. Nothing is sent anywhere, and the download is generated locally.
How to use Add Text to Video
- 01Upload
Add your video
Drop a clip in; it plays in the preview with your caption overlaid live.
- 02Customize
Write and place the text
Type your caption, then pick a position, size and colour, with optional outline or background plate.
- 03Process
Export
Export to burn the text onto the video and download the captioned clip.
What you are adding
The words are rendered into every frame they appear on. They cannot be turned off, translated or searched — unlike real subtitles, which travel as a separate track.
Burned-in text plays everywhere, including on platforms that autoplay muted and ignore subtitle tracks. That reliability is the reason to do it.
Where and for how long
- Away from the interface
Phone apps overlay controls, captions and buttons on the bottom third and the right edge. Keep text out of both.
- Long enough to read
Roughly a second plus a third of a second per word. Text that appears and vanishes is worse than no text.
- Legible over motion
A moving background defeats thin type. Weight, an outline, or a semi-transparent band behind the words all work.
Before you publish it
Fonts have licences — Embedding a typeface into a published video is a use the licence may or may not permit.
Burned-in is not accessible — Screen readers cannot read pixels. For accessibility, real captions are required as well.
Check it muted — Most feed video plays silent by default. If the text does not carry the meaning alone, it is not doing its job.
Supported formats
- MP4
- MOV
- WebM
- AVI
- MKV
- Maximum file size —
- bounded by your device's memory
- Processed by —
- FFmpeg (WebAssembly), on your device
Your file, and what the page does
Your file is never uploaded. Add Text to Video reads it into this browser tab and processes it with FFmpeg compiled to WebAssembly on your own device. There is no upload endpoint in the application and no copy on any server — closing the tab discards it.
That is also why processing takes longer here than on a site that uploads: your device is doing the work rather than a rack of servers. The trade is that the file never leaves it.
What the page does send or fetch
- The processing engine, once
- The first time you use any video or audio tool, the browser downloads the FFmpeg WebAssembly build (~30MB) from the jsDelivr CDN and reuses the cached copy afterwards. That is a file coming to you — no part of your own file is in the request.
- Ads on the page
- The site is funded by advertising, so the page loads Google AdSense. That carries the usual web basics — IP address, browser, referring page — as on any ad-supported site.
- An anonymous usage counter
- When Add Text to Video finishes we record that the tool ran, whether it succeeded and how long it took. No file data, no identifier, no cookie.
Your file is not on that list. How this works.
Frequently asked questions
Yes — place it at the top, middle or bottom and choose a size. An outline or background plate keeps it readable over any footage.
Yes — the text is overlaid across every frame. For captions that change over time, use the full editor.
The caption is rendered with the same canvas the preview uses, sized to the video's real resolution, so the exported frame matches what you positioned.
Yes — Add Text to Video is completely free. There's no account, sign-up, watermark or limit.
No. It runs in any modern browser — Chrome, Edge, Safari, Firefox, Brave — with nothing to download or install.
Not sure this is what you need?
- Words over a videoAdd Text to Video
- The meme layoutMeme Maker
- Music rather than wordsAdd Music to Video
- Text on a still imageAdd Text to Image
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