Captions and Transcripts
Watch videos with subtitles and use the click-to-jump transcript
For any video lesson where your instructor has uploaded captions, you can turn on subtitles and read along with a synced transcript on the side. Both are great for accessibility, learning a second language, studying in noisy places, or just searching a long lecture for one specific moment.
Turning on captions
In the video player, look for the CC button next to the speed and fullscreen controls. Tap it to open the language menu.
You'll see every language your instructor has uploaded — typically English, sometimes Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, Marathi, Bengali, or Gujarati. Languages appear in their own script, so a Hindi speaker sees हिन्दी rather than "Hindi."
Pick a language and the captions appear at the bottom of the video. Pick Off to turn them off.
Your language pick is remembered across lessons. Once you've chosen Tamil on one video, every subsequent video defaults to Tamil if a Tamil track exists. If not, it falls back to whatever your instructor set as default.
The transcript panel
Below the video, you'll see a Transcript panel showing the full caption text from start to finish. Two things make it useful:
Live highlighting
As the video plays, the current line in the transcript is highlighted. You can read along, or scroll ahead to see what's coming.
Click to jump
Tap any line in the transcript and the video jumps to that exact moment. This is the killer feature — it turns a one-hour lecture into a searchable document.
The panel also has a search box at the top. Type a keyword and it filters the transcript to lines containing that word. Combine search + click-to-jump and you've got an instant index of every video lesson.
When captions aren't available
Not every video has captions yet. If you don't see the CC button, your instructor hasn't uploaded a caption file for this lesson.
YouTube and Vimeo videos use their own caption systems — turn captions on through the YouTube/Vimeo player controls, not the OptiLearn CC menu.
Using captions on mobile
The OptiLearn mobile app has the same CC menu and transcript panel. On phone screens, the transcript collapses below the video — swipe up to see it, or rotate to landscape for a wider view.
Tips
- Use captions when learning a new subject even if you don't usually need them — reading + listening reinforces vocabulary.
- Use the transcript to revise. It's faster to scan a transcript for the bit you want than to scrub through the video.
- Use search to find formulas, definitions, or names. Especially for long technical lectures.
- Combine with bookmarks. Click a transcript line to jump there, then bookmark the moment if you'll want to come back.
Related
- Notes and bookmarks — save moments you'll need to revisit
- Taking a course — overall lesson player walkthrough