Free Video Caption Styling Presets (ffmpeg/libass, 5-Pack)

Five ready-to-use caption styling presets for burning subtitles directly into video — free, no email required. Built for anyone who already edits video with ffmpeg and wants styled, hard-coded captions instead of a plain, unstyled subtitle track.

Download the preset pack (.zip, presets.json + burn_captions.py + example render) →

What's inside

YouTube — bold bottom-center — bold white, black outline, standard 16:9 long-form.
Shorts/Reels/TikTok — vertical safe-zone — large bold yellow, tuned to clear the platform UI bands on 9:16 video.
Podcast lower-third — small, clean, unobtrusive, for interview/podcast clips.
Corporate minimal — dark semi-opaque box, no outline glow, for webinar/training/B2B demos.
Accessibility high-contrast — large, high-contrast yellow-on-black, WCAG-oriented.

Every preset is a plain ffmpeg force_style string (presets.json) plus a small Python script (burn_captions.py) that burns any .srt file into a styled video with one ffmpeg call. Each preset was actually rendered and visually checked before release — the vertical Shorts preset caught a real margin-scaling bug in ffmpeg's subtitle filter during testing, fixed and documented in the script so you don't hit it yourself. One example render (styled captions + real audio, corporate-minimal preset) is included in the zip.

Requirements

ffmpeg with libass support (most standard builds have this) and Python 3. Command-line use — built for video editors and anyone comfortable running a script, not a no-install web tool.

Usage

python3 burn_captions.py --srt path/to.srt --preset shorts-vertical-center \
    --out out.mp4 --audio path/to.wav --width 540 --height 960

Free to use, no attribution required, no licensing questions — no external API calls, no data leaves your machine.

Need the transcript first?

Read the full step-by-step guide — how to get a timed transcript, clean it up, and burn it in, start to finish.

Other Engineer Tsai Studio services: PDF tables to Excel, product photo background removal, Chart of Accounts starter pack. Questions: hello@tsaielectro.com.