VLC, QuickTime, IINA
It taps the audio an application plays rather than reading a file, so the player is irrelevant. Anything that makes sound is a source, including formats and codecs a subtitle workflow would have argued with.
Subtitles · Subtitles for video with no track
Subtitles for the video
that came without any.
Subtitles reads the audio a player is putting out and draws the words over the top, so a file with no subtitle track, a stream that never offered one and a video in a browser tab all caption the same way. Nothing is downloaded and nothing has to be prepared first.
Launch week: $5 instead of $9 until 22 August · 14-day refund
14-day refund, no questions asked
One-time $9, every future update included ·
macOS 14.2 or later · Apple Silicon
Unlimited captions, for as long as you like. No minutes to buy, no
account, no subscription.
What it draws over
Any browser tab
It captures the helper processes a browser spawns, which is where that audio actually comes from. An embedded player, a video in a web app and a stream on a site with no caption button all work.
Above the window, not inside it
The overlay sits on top of everything and takes no clicks, so it stays put in full screen and while you take notes in front of it. You set the size, the opacity and where it lives.
Music stays music
A voice detector runs ahead of the recogniser, so a score or a backing track does not turn into invented lyrics during the parts of a film where nobody is speaking.
The videos that were never going to have subtitles
Streaming, live and the thing somebody sent you ten minutes ago have one problem in common: there is no file to prepare, and no gap in which to prepare it. That is the whole of what this is for.
- Anything streaming. A protected film, a paid course, a conference stream, a video embedded in a page. There is no file to hand to a transcriber, and there was never going to be one.
- Anything live. A broadcast, a launch, a webinar, a match. Batch transcription needs the recording to have finished, which is the one thing live audio has not done.
- Anything you are watching right now. A link a colleague sent you at eleven in the morning does not survive a ten-minute detour through a terminal. Most video is watched once, shortly after somebody sends it.
- Anything you would rather not hand over. Uploading a recording of a private call to a subtitle service to get a caption track back is a strange trade. This never opens a socket after the model is fetched.
If you have the file, make a subtitle file first
There is one case where something free beats this, and it is worth saying
plainly. If the video is a file sitting on your disk and you are going to
watch it more than once, run it through a Whisper-based transcriber and
get a real .srt out of it. MacWhisper does this with a
window, and whisper.cpp does it from a terminal, both offline and both
free or close to it. VLC will happily load the result.
A subtitle file is better than an overlay for that job in every way that matters: it seeks with the video, you can scrub back without missing anything, it survives the session, and you can fix a line it got wrong. Spending $9 to avoid a ten-minute transcode is not a good trade, and this page is not going to pretend otherwise.
Questions
- Does it create an .srt file I can keep?
- No. Nothing is written to disk at all: captions are drawn on screen and then they are gone. If a file is what you want, a Whisper-based transcriber is the right tool and it is free. This is for the videos you cannot or will not put through one.
- Does it work with Netflix, Disney+ and other protected video?
- It captions the audio those apps play, the same as any other app, because it never touches the video or the file. Most of these services do ship their own subtitles, so the case for this is narrower there: it is the titles where the subtitle track is missing in the language you need, or absent entirely.
- Can it translate a foreign film into English?
- No. It transcribes rather than translates, so French audio becomes French text. That is deliberately useful if you are learning the language, and no use at all if you are not.
- Will it caption a video that is already playing full screen?
- Yes. The overlay is the top layer above every window, full screen included, and it never takes a click, so nothing about the player changes.
- How accurate is it on film dialogue?
- Good on clear speech and worse where you would expect: whispered lines, heavy accents, overlapping dialogue and anything mixed under music. It is a reading aid for a film with no subtitles, not a replacement for a proper subtitle track where one exists.
The same overlay, elsewhere
Learning a language
Subtitles in the language being spoken, not translated into yours.
vs Apple Live Captions
macOS has this built in and free. Where it stops being enough.
Zoom
Captions without the host switching anything on.
Microsoft Teams
Captions that do not depend on what your tenant's admin allows.
Google Meet
On-device captions, and no Workspace tier to be on.
Slack huddles
Captions with no workspace app to get approved.
Lectures
Captions live, rather than once the recording is processed.
Podcasts
Captions for the shows that never had a transcript.
vs Granola and notes apps
Complementary, not alternatives. Notes after, captions during.
Watch the one that came without subtitles.
Launch week: $5 instead of $9 until 22 August · 14-day refund
14-day refund, no questions asked
One-time $9, every future update included ·
macOS 14.2 or later · Apple Silicon
Unlimited live captions, for as long as you own the Mac. No minutes to
buy, no account, no subscription.