Why captions are not showing

When captions silently fail to display, the cause is almost always one of a small number of structural problems. Walk through this list before re-exporting from your editor.

1. The file is not the format you think it is

A .vtt file that does not begin with WEBVTT on line one is rejected by every HTML5 video element on the open web. An .srt file with dot timestamps will silently drop cues in many players. If you see no captions at all, this is the first thing to check.

2. Encoding is wrong

Files exported from Windows tools are sometimes UTF-16 or have a BOM that confuses browsers. UTF-8 without a BOM is the safe default. CaptionPass normalizes encoding on every run.

3. Cues overlap

When two cues overlap by more than a few milliseconds, players differ on which one to render. The most common visible symptom is captions flickering or skipping a line. Trim the earlier cue's end time so it ends before the next one begins.

4. Styling tags are unsupported

TikTok and most native video players strip or reject styling tags. If your editor exported <font color="…">wrappers around every cue, the upload may be rejected silently. Strip them.

5. The track is loaded but disabled

On HTML5 video, captions need either a default attribute on the <track> element or a user action to enable them. This one is on your front-end, not the file.

CaptionPass's validation report names every issue from this list and rewrites the file to fix the ones it can. Try it on your file.