Questions,
answered.

OpaCaptions is a Windows app that adds animated, word-by-word captions to videos and podcasts. It transcribes speech with OpenAI's Whisper AI and burns styled captions into an MP4, plus SRT, VTT and TXT files, entirely on your own PC. Nothing is uploaded, and it's a one-time purchase, not a subscription.

Use a captioning app that runs on your own computer. With OpaCaptions you drop in your video, pick a caption style and language, and export. Speech recognition and rendering both happen locally, so your footage never leaves your PC.

More than 55, and growing: new styles arrive in updates. Eleven are new for 2027: Plate, Story, Frost, Emoji Pop (a matching emoji pops above the key word, in English), Numbers (numbers and amounts jump out, big and green), Ticker, Underline, Echo, Bouncing Ball, Notes and Soft Serif. Twenty more were made for social video: ten for TikTok (Punch, which zooms the video in on each line's key word; Loud, which sizes words by how loudly they're said; Cascade, Decode, Chrome, 3D Pop, Turbo, Stamp, Split and Arcade) and ten made for Instagram Reels (Write-on, Luxe, Sunset, Neon Sign, Bubble, Chat, Word Stack, Retro Shadow, Hollow and Scrapbook). The originals: Bold Pop, Neon, Highlighter, Bounce, Karaoke, Glitch, Wobble, Focus, Keyword, Headline, Sticker and Comic highlight each word as it's spoken; Big Word shows one word at a time; Typewriter types the words out; Classic, Minimal, Cinema, Duo, Slide Up, Lower Third and Poster show a line at a time; Editorial and Spotlight box each caption's key word, and Marker runs a lime marker under each spoken word. More are on the way. Free includes Bold Pop, Classic, Minimal, Plate, Story and Numbers; Pro unlocks every style and lets you customise fonts, colours, size and position. See them on real footage on the styles page (opacaptions.com/styles.html).

An MP4 with the captions burned in, SRT and VTT subtitle files for YouTube, Premiere, CapCut and other editors, and a TXT transcript.

Video or audio of any size, up to 4 hours long: MP4, MOV, MKV, WEBM, MP3, WAV and M4A. Audio files get a clean background video so you can post them too.

Yes, with Pro. Drop in your podcast, livestream, vlog or YouTube video and OpaCaptions suggests the moments worth posting, cuts them on whole sentences, reframes them to 9:16 for Shorts, Reels and TikTok so the picture follows whoever is talking, and captions them. Pro exports the clips one by one; Studio exports them all at once with your brand kit. Like everything else, it runs on your PC.

Yes, on every plan. When you open a file, choose a format: keep the original, or make it 9:16 for TikTok, Reels and Shorts, 1:1, 4:5 for the Instagram feed, or 16:9 for YouTube. Fill crops to the new shape, with a slider to choose which part stays in view; Fit keeps the whole video over a blurred copy of itself. The captions are laid out for the new shape, and you can change it at any time before you export.

Yes. Phone-shaped videos get bigger captions placed above the like, comment and share buttons, so nothing important is covered.

Pro and Studio include a Share step. After you export, it suggests a caption with hashtags from what was said, copies it, opens the platform's upload page in your browser and shows the video in File Explorer, ready to drag in. The video goes straight from your PC to the platform you choose, never to us. Posting straight from the app is on the way.

Yes, on every plan, including Free. Click any word in the transcript to retype it, split it or delete it, nudge a line's timing, and undo with Ctrl+Z. The preview and every export use your fixes. Save your work as a project (Ctrl+S) and it reopens exactly where you left off; from then on, changes save by themselves.

Yes, with Pro and Studio. The Overlays tab adds your logo (PNG, JPG, WebP or SVG), any text you like, such as a title, a call to action or an episode number, and a name tag that shows who is talking each time the speaker changes. Drag them into place on the preview, choose when each one shows, and they're burned into the MP4 with your captions. Studio's preset packs carry your logo, so the whole team's videos match.

Yes, with Pro and Studio. Choose Detect who speaks (or how many people talk) before transcribing, and OpaCaptions labels each change of speaker, on your own PC like everything else. Rename the speakers, fix any line in one click, and give each voice its own caption colour if you like. SRT, VTT and TXT files name the speakers. It works best when people take turns; check the labels where voices overlap or replies are very short.

Yes. Speech recognition (OpenAI's open-source Whisper model) and video rendering run on your own computer, so your videos, audio and transcripts are never uploaded to us or to any AI service. The internet is only used to download the speech model once, to activate your licence and to check for updates.

No, and we couldn't if we wanted to. Your videos never reach us. The AI model runs on your PC and doesn't send anything back.

Your email address, your licence key and an anonymous device ID for each PC you activate. Nothing about your videos, transcripts or file names is ever collected.

Yes. After the one-time model download and licence activation, captioning needs no internet. Switch on airplane mode and caption a video to see for yourself.

Because your footage is processed only on your own computer, no third party (including us) handles it. That removes a data processor from the picture and makes compliance simpler. Compliance depends on your whole workflow, though, so please confirm with your own legal or compliance team.

There's a free version with six caption styles (including Bold Pop), Fast accuracy, videos up to 3 minutes and a small watermark. Pro is a one-time $49 for one PC, and Studio is a one-time $99 for teams, on up to five PCs. Early-bird prices until 31 December 2026: Pro $29, Studio $69.

No. You pay once and keep the app forever. Updates for the first year are included; after that you can renew updates for $19 a year if you want new versions.

Pro activates on one PC and Studio on five. You can move a licence to a new PC whenever you like by deactivating the old one in your account or in the app.

Yes. Every purchase comes with a 14-day money-back guarantee. Email support@opacaptions.com and we'll refund you in full.

Yes. Registered non-profits get a free licence once we've verified them. See how to apply on our contact page.

No. It runs on an ordinary Windows 10 or 11 laptop with 8 GB of RAM, no graphics card required. We built and tested it on an 8th-gen Intel Core i5 laptop. Faster PCs simply finish sooner.

17: English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Arabic, Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Turkish and Polish, plus auto-detect. You can also translate any of them into English captions.

No. The speech model, OpenAI's Whisper, was trained on hundreds of thousands of hours of speech, so it understands every supported language from the very first file. There's no voice training, no sample recordings and no setup per language. Fast comes with the app; Balanced and Best download once, the first time you use them, then work offline. If you like, add names, brands or jargon to My words as spelling hints. Nothing about your voice is learned or stored.

On clear speech it gets almost every word right. Use Balanced or Best for accents, background noise or technical vocabulary, and review the transcript before you publish.

Windows comes first. A Mac version is on the roadmap: sign up and tell us you're on Mac.

We're in early access now, and OpaCaptions launches soon. Early-bird prices run until 31 December 2026: Pro $29 instead of $49, Studio $69 instead of $99. Create a free account and we'll email you the download link on launch day.

An account is where your download, licence keys and devices live. It holds only your email, licences and devices, never your videos.

Enter your email and we'll send a one-time sign-in link. You can also set a password in your account settings if you prefer.

Opa! is the Greek cry of joy, and it's exactly how captioning should feel: drop in your video, pick a style, and watch every word come alive.