Subtitles are fantastic to get a wider reach for your video be it to make it more accessible to hearing impared audiences or foreign language users. As digital video and video on the web allow us to deal with subtitles in various ways. We will look at background of differnet kinds of subtitls and take a closer look at creating some of the more open versions.

Closed Captions v Open Captions

The term "closed" (versus "open") indicates the ability for viewers to turn on or off the captions. "Open captions," "burned-in" or "hardcoded" captions are visible to all viewers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_captioning

Closed captions are generally better for open video as they often allow us to alter the subtitles or to more easily translate them.

Playing Video Captions Online

Many video sharing systems allow you to play captions and subtitles on top of your video files. The used of closed captions allow you to choose different language possibilities rather than having only the subtitles of only one language burned into your video. Below we can see a video with English subtitles selected.

Task

Use Amara or a desktop subtitler to create an srt subtitle file and play it in VLC to test it.