Our Top 5 Closed Caption Types and How They Work

Capital Captions have a wide range of clients with regular projects including movies, adverts, documentaries, video blogs, e-learning, conferences and more. Creating closed captions is an incredibly diverse business, involving not only a huge range of project styles but also a massive variety of caption formats and broadcaster requirement. With years of experience under our belts, today we’re looking at our Top 5 Closed Caption Types and How They Work to see what our recommended caption formats are, and why we love them so much. 

WebVTT

WebVTT shares many characteristics with SRT, though it has less widespread compatibility with online video sharing.  The WebVTT format allows the formatting of font styles, colours, placements and other features where SRT does not. However, not all video sharing platforms and/or sites are compatible with the VTT format. It’s a relatively easy subtitle format to create and work with, however, which makes it popular with many clients, especially for videos where there may be unclear sections or text to be amended.

DFXP / XML

The subtitle format most popularly used for Amazon Prime and online VoD services. DFXP captions are highly formattable, with font, positioning, colour and style changes enabled. Typically, character limits should be set at 47, but this can be relatively flexible. This format can be supplied with extensions .dfxp or .xml, as specified by the service provider and it’s important to get this correct.

EBU-TT

This is the go-to format used by the BBC and other large television broadcasters. Whilst EBU-TT is designed for use with broadcast and online content, EBU-TT-D is a sub-format which is used for online only. The purpose of EBU-TT captions is to provide a format which can be universally shared as a standard across all broadcast and online channels. It is XML based and is growing in popularity. EBU-TT has specific and universal limitations in terms of character limits and allows almost all formatting and a range of characters, with some language exceptions.

STL

EBU-STL is a broadcast closed caption format. STL has very specific allowances in terms of characters and character limits. However, it is incredibly flexible in terms of working with fonts, colours, backgrounds, positioning and forced narratives. STL subtitles are often used within VoD services and are compatible with different video frame rates.

SRT

SRT is the most commonly used subtitle formats in the industry for a reason. SRT files are relatively simple to create with subtitling software. They are incredibly flexible in terms of character limits and encoding options, but do not allow any specific formatting in terms of text colour, size, background or position. An SRT file consists only of plain timed-text which can be uploaded to most video sharing sites where it will display in the default style associated with that platform. SRT files can be turned on and off by viewers as required, and can be burned into videos to display as a permanent part of the video image if preferred.

So there you have it, our Top 5 Closed Caption Types and How They Work. As you can se our most popular type of captions are SRT file formats. If you are looking to caption your work in order to gain more viewers or broaden your customer base, why not let Capital Captions produce your captions for you at an affordable rate and timely manner. Click the button below for a quick and easy quote.