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I own a YouTube video, and I typed up subtitles for it.

I've tagged it with yt:cc=on, and I've embedded its iframe onto my website using cc_load_policy=1&cc=1 (see docs).

When I visit my webpage using Chrome on my desktop, the captions appear by default, which is the desired experience.

But when I visit the webpage using my iPhone (Chrome on iOS), the captions do not appear by default. How can I make captions appear by default on iOS?

(They are available if I click the speech bubble icon, but I don't want users to need to know how to do that.)

Ryan
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  • I'm also interested to hear about alternatives to YouTube (for hosting video)... if you happen to know of a host who can show captions by default on *all* devices. Thanks. – Ryan Aug 08 '16 at 22:30
  • 250 views with no upvotes yet? Well, I hope you find the answer somewhere, fellow Googler. ;-) – Ryan Jan 08 '17 at 19:36

1 Answers1

2

Also answered on this possible duplicate

The only way I found is changing the URI from this pattern

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= + video_id

to this pattern

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/ + video_id + ?hl= lang_code

On bash/Linux you can just copy the URI with that structure and then run this command to transform clipboard content (you can make an alias):

xclip -selection c -o | echo "$(cat -)?&hl=es-419" | sed "s|youtube.com/watch?v=|youtube-nocookie.com/embed/|1" | xclip -selection c

On the example from above I hardcoded Spanish language code. You should use one of the available language codes for that particular video. You can list the available subtitles ISO 639-1 language codes with youtube-dl, under the section Available subtitles for (won't work for automatic captions):

youtube-dl --list-subs "{video_id or url}"

The only drawback is that the video will cover the complete screen... which might be good thing to stop procrastinating with related videos :)

sergiol
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Pablo Bianchi
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  • I just tried your answer, and it did not work on iOS, which is what my question is about. – Ryan Apr 02 '19 at 19:29
  • Please tell me if [this URL](https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/2s3aJfRr9gE?&hl=es-419) doesn't have Spanish subtitles by default. If it doesn't work I'll delete my answer. – Pablo Bianchi Apr 02 '19 at 19:31
  • Interesting. That did seem to work. But why does it not work when I change your URL from `es-419` to `en` (which I think should be a valid code according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_639-1_codes) or `en-US`? – Ryan Apr 02 '19 at 20:06
  • And also, what settings do *my* videos need to have for your URL pattern to work to force English captions? – Ryan Apr 02 '19 at 20:07
  • Maybe is not listed between the available languages. Use `youtube-dl --list-subs` to check this out. I edit my question to provide more info regarding this issue. AFAIK there is no documentation about this feature. It could even stop working at any moment Google decide to. – Pablo Bianchi Apr 02 '19 at 20:54