adding captions/subtitles to a video

file formats

• SubRip (.srt) format. [how-to] [file format]
  • Facebook accepts these. However NOTE that Facebook expects filenames to be in the format "filename.en_US.srt".
• ASSA — Advanced Sub Station Alpha

speech-recognition tools

• HappyScribe.com — a speech-recognition tool that can generate .srt files
  • It's a relatively inexpensive pay-as-you-go service, and I often have some spare credits there.
• YouTube has a free voice-recognition service
• (TODO — other voice-recognition services)

render "hard subtitles"

• Handbrake — can render subtitles onto a video itself [how-to]
  • can import .srt files, among other formats
  • the feature "burn in" means to overlay the text permanently as part of the video; also known as "hard subtitles" as opposed to "soft subtitles"
  • if you want to change the burned-in font settings, it's pretty tedious, but it can be done by modifying the .srt file like this

If you're wondering the question "Does Shotcut support rendering hard subtitles?", unfortunately, the answer is "no". You'll want to use an external tool to do this.

editing subtitle files

• HappyScribe (mentioned above) is great at this.
• Subtitle Edit — an open-source tool.
• Aegisub — also open-source.