Add subtitles or captions to your Microsoft Stream (Classic) video

Warning

Microsoft Stream (Classic) is being retired and replaced by Stream (on SharePoint) and Microsoft Teams live events. It is recommended to start using Stream (on SharePoint) by uploading videos to SharePoint, Teams, Viva Engage, or OneDrive, and to run your live events through Teams and Viva Engage.

Functionality in Stream (Classic) will be changed and removed leading up to the retirement date. Learn more about Stream (on SharePoint)...

You can add subtitles or captions to any Microsoft Stream (Classic) video during upload or after. You can also choose to configure your video so Stream (Classic) generates captions automatically using Automatic Speech Recognition technology. For more information, see Autogenerate captions.

Captions are indexed and used by Stream (Classic) to power deep search, helping viewers watch exactly what they need. For information about how to use deep search, see Search words spoken in a video.

  • You can't upload a caption file if you have selected to autogenerate captions.

  • You can't autogenerate captions if you have already uploaded a caption file.

Upload a subtitle or caption file to an existing video

  1. In Stream, find the video you want to edit (for example, through My videos, My channels, My groups or Browse)

  2. Click the pencil icon to Update video details

    Update video details from the edit icon.

  3. In the Options window, upload Subtitles and Captions by selecting a language and uploading your file

    Closed captions window.

View subtitles or captions

Subtitles and captions can be viewed with the video player on the playback page.

Download subtitles or captions

If you have uploaded a subtitle or caption file, or autogenerated a caption file, you can download the WebVTT file from the Update video details page.

Video details page.

Update video details.

If you need to make changes to the autogenerated transcript / caption, you can download the caption file and edit it in a text editor of choice before uploading it back to Stream, or you can edit the transcript directly in Microsoft Stream (Classic) in the transcript window.

Get just the text from a transcript

At times you may want to get a copy of a video's transcript without any time codes, metadata, and extra lines.

Microsoft Stream (Classic) doesn't have a built in way to do this, but you can download the transcript (as listed above) and use a simple web utility to extract the transcript text from your downloaded VTT file. This web utility allows you to pick VTT files from your computer and get a copy of the text portion of the VTT file containing just the transcript.

Web utility: Microsoft Stream (Classic) transcript VTT file cleaner

See also

Edit transcripts

Autogenerate captions