Hardcoded subtitles are baked into the pixels, so they cannot simply be switched off. Learn how to tell hard subtitles from soft tracks, then erase burned-in captions and optionally burn in your own translation — free to start.
Manual translation, hired voice actors, days of waiting. Creators and teams lose time and money on every single video.
Skip the old workflowHow do I tell whether the subtitles in my video are hardcoded or just a separate subtitle track?
The original subtitles sit on top of a moving background — will erasing them leave a visible band?
I want to localize a foreign clip: strip the original subtitles and burn in English ones without opening my editor.
Upload, pick languages, and let the AI handle the rest. No software to install.
A few clicks, that is all.
A few clicks, that is all.
A few clicks, that is all.
A few clicks, that is all.
There are two kinds of subtitles in the world, and only one of them can be switched off. Soft subtitles live in a separate track inside the file (SRT, ASS, or a mov_text stream): the player draws them on top, so removing them is a container operation, not a video operation. Hardcoded subtitles — also called burned-in, baked-in, or open captions — are different, because they were rendered into the frames themselves. There is no track to delete. The quick test: pause on a frame, take a screenshot, and look at the image. If the subtitle is still there, it is hardcoded. Erasing one means covering or treating the pixels in the caption area. SpeakVid does the second: box the caption band, set the strength, check the before/after preview, export. The same task can then burn in a new SRT on top of the clean picture, which is the standard route for localizing a foreign clip — strip the original line, then drop the translation in with the original timing intact. Soft subtitle tracks never need this page: upload the SRT to the subtitle tool and translate it without touching a single pixel.
Half of all subtitle problems are the wrong workflow: people re-encode a whole video when they only needed to drop a text track. The test takes five seconds and saves an hour.
Localization in one pass: the burned-in caption is erased and your translated SRT is rendered onto the clean picture with the original timing preserved.
No watermark added, no plugin, no app. The area outside your selection is not re-encoded, so a video cleaned here does not lose quality in the parts you never touched.
Pause playback on a frame that shows a subtitle, take a screenshot, and look at the screenshot. If the subtitle appears in the image, it is hardcoded into the video. If the screenshot shows no subtitle, the text you see is a separate track that the player is drawing on top — that one can be removed or replaced without touching the video at all.
Upload the video, drag a box over the subtitle band (bottom centre in most footage, but check bilingual or top-positioned styles), set the erase strength, confirm with the before/after preview and export the MP4. Erasure costs 1 credit per 30 seconds of video, and signing up gives you 20 credits.
Only the selected area is treated — everything outside it keeps the original encoding. The visible trade-off is inside the selection: a subtitle sitting on a busy moving background will look smoother there than the surrounding frame, because that area has been filled and blended.
Yes, and it is the normal localization workflow. Erase the burned-in original, then burn in your translated SRT — the tool keeps the original timeline so the new lines land where the old ones were. You can also keep the cleaning and the new subtitles as separate steps if you want to review the erased result before committing.
That is a different job: the track can be dropped or replaced without any pixel-level processing, and dropping it loses no quality at all. Upload the SRT to the subtitle tool to translate or replace it — only the hardcoded case needs the video eraser.
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