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Is it possible to add even simple formatting for YouTube captions? (e.g. bold, italics, underlined.)

Briefly Googling, some suggest that adding html-style markup to your .srt or .vtt files will work, e.g. <i>italicized text</i> but I tried it and it doesn't seem to work.

karel
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3 Answers3

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I was able to get italics to work in my YouTube video by replacing my video's srt file with a vtt file that I converted here:

Simple SubRip to WebVTT converter

I don't know why it worked, since the code entries for <i></i> from the srt file wasn't replaced by other/different code in the vtt file (such as [i][/i] or something similar), and the subtitle listing in the YouTube subtitle editing page removed the <i></i> tags altogether. But it worked. Phew.

I hope it works for you :)

Bret Leduc
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Youtube supports some formatting in WebVTT (.vtt) subtitle files. It may only be visible after the subtitles are "published", and viewed on the standard youtube page, not in the edit page.

The advantage of .vtt is that in it's basic form, it's very close to the common .srt format. Just add "WEBVTT" at the top, followed by an empty line, and replace commas in timecodes by dots.

If you are on Mac or Linux, you can convert a SubRip file to .vtt with this command:

perl -pe 'BEGIN {print "WEBVTT\n\n"}; s/(\d),(\d)/$1.$2/g' yoursubs.srt >newsubs.vtt
mivk
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Youtube doesn't support markup with .srt, and supports "Initial Implementation" (whatever that means) with .vtt. Check out this list of supported formats for CC

The link suggests that RealText (.rt) supports simple markup. You should try that.

Leathe
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  • I tried RealText but it doesn't seem to work, unfortunately. I tried the sample file given here, but YouTube simply displays the two lines as plain text without any markup. But perhaps I was doing it wrong and someone can show me. –  Nov 03 '15 at 13:36