How to add subtitles to a video in html?

Question

I tried using the track element, but it didn't work..could you please tell me if there's something I am doing wrong?

<video controls="controls" id="video1" width="450">
    <source src="A taste of TED.mp4" type="video/mp4">
    <track src="TED.vtt" kind="subtitles" srclang="en" label="English">
 </video>

The subtitle file (TED.vtt) looks like this:

WEBVTT

1
00:00:01.000 --> 00:00:10.000
This is the first line of text, displaying from 1-10 seconds

2
00:00:15.000 --> 00:00:20.000
And the second line of text
separated over two lines

Answer 1

The code:

<video controls="controls" id="video1" width="450">
    <source src="A taste of TED.mp4" type="video/mp4" />
    <track src="TED.vtt" kind="subtitles" srclang="en" label="English" />
</video>

Works. What you may be doing wrong is that you are using .srt subtitles instead of .vtt

srt:

1
00:01:21,700 --> 00:01:24,675
Life on the road is something 
I was raised to embrace.

vtt:

WEBVTT

01:21.700 --> 01:24.675
Life on the road is something 
I was <i>raised</i> to embrace.

What you need to do is:

• Start the text file with WEBVTT
• Remove the cue markers at the start of each subtitle, or replace them with Cue - prefixes.
• Optionally, remove the 00: hour marker at the start of each timestamp.
• Convert the comma before the millisecond mark in every timestamp to a decimal point (easy enough with a find-replace: ,7 to .7, for example).
• Optionally, add styling markup to the subtitle text.
• Save the file with a .vtt extension and link to it from a element in an HTML5 page.

Also it may be possible that your web bowser does not support the video tag, I know for example that some cellphones do not play videos with this tag!

• The second part of the answer was taken from a post by Dudley Storey.