FFmpeg Captions and Subtitles — guide skill for captions & subtitles

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FFmpeg subtitle reference: burn SRT/ASS/VTT with libass, soft tracks, conversion, styling and FFmpeg 8's Whisper filter.

• Type: Guide · Captions & subtitles
• Slug: josiahsiegel-ffmpeg-captions
• Status: live
• Publisher: Josiah Siegel (community)
• License: MIT
• Source: https://github.com/JosiahSiegel/claude-plugin-marketplace/tree/main/plugins/ffmpeg-core/skills/ffmpeg-captions-subtitles
• Works in: Claude Code
• Requires: ffmpeg built with libass (FFmpeg 8 built with whisper.cpp for the whisper filter)
• Cost: Free — runs locally with ffmpeg
• Adoption: 469 installs, 59 GitHub stars (GitHub + skills.sh, 2026-10-26)

What it does

A reference skill for subtitle work in FFmpeg 7.1 and 8.0: burning SRT, ASS and VTT with the subtitles and ass filters, force_style styling and alignment, soft mov_text tracks, extraction and format conversion, CEA-608/708 closed captions and drawtext overlays. It documents FFmpeg 8's whisper audio filter for writing SRT straight from audio (needs a build configured with whisper.cpp), and the plugin ships a helper that fetches a ggml model and writes SRT plus VTT. Sibling skills in the same plugin marketplace cover ASS karaoke and kinetic captions (ffmpeg-karaoke-animated-text, ffmpeg-kinetic-captions). It comes from a large generalist plugin marketplace, and the SKILL.md opens with generic boilerplate rules (Windows paths, no new docs).

Use when

• Burn SRT, ASS or VTT subtitles into a video
• Add a soft subtitle track or extract subtitles
• Style captions (font, outline, position) with force_style
• Generate subtitles with FFmpeg 8's Whisper filter

Not for

• Word-by-word animated captions (use caption-animation or the sibling ffmpeg-kinetic-captions)
• General encoding and editing (kajisho5/ffmpeg-skill)

Install

• Claude Code: npx skills add https://github.com/josiahsiegel/claude-plugin-marketplace --skill ffmpeg-captions-subtitles

More captions & subtitles skills

• 3D Camera Captions: Captions that live in 3D around a talking head: the camera flies through the words, heroes pass behind the speaker.
• Remotion Captions: Transcribe speech and burn in animated captions with Remotion, or import an existing SRT file.
• ElevenLabs Speech to Text: Transcribe audio and video with word timestamps, speaker labels and keyterms, ready for subtitles.
• ElevenLabs Speech to Text (inference.sh): Transcribe audio with ElevenLabs Scribe, speaker diarization and forced alignment, via inference.sh.
• Speech to Text: Transcribe audio with ElevenLabs Scribe v2 or Whisper V3 Large, with timestamps and speaker labels.
• Pretext Text Metrics: Measure and fit text without the DOM using pretext: auto-fit sizes, know line breaks before render, canvas/WebGL text.