No Captions Are Available for This Video? How to Add Them

You open a YouTube video, reach for the CC button — and it's greyed out, or the settings menu says "No captions are available for this video." No subtitles, no auto-generated captions, nothing to translate. If you're watching in a language you're still learning, the video is suddenly out of reach.

The advice you'll find elsewhere boils down to "ask the creator to add subtitles" or "fix your caption settings" — neither of which helps when the captions simply don't exist. But there is now a real fix: as a viewer, you can have subtitles generated for any YouTube video, right on the page, without downloading or re-uploading anything. That's what this guide covers.

Get subtitles on any YouTube video — free →

Why does YouTube say "No captions are available for this video"?

It means the creator never uploaded a subtitle track and YouTube's automatic captions weren't generated for this video. When both are missing, the player has nothing to show — so the CC button is disabled and the message appears. It's not a bug on your end, and no setting on your side will bring the captions back.

Auto-captions can be missing for several reasons:

• The language isn't supported by YouTube's speech recognition. Auto-captions exist for a limited set of languages; videos in other languages get nothing.
• The audio is hard to transcribe. Music over speech, several people talking at once, background noise, or long stretches without speech can make YouTube skip captioning entirely.
• The video is very new. Auto-captions take a while to process after upload — though if the video is months old and still has none, they're not coming.
• The creator turned captions off. Channel owners can disable auto-captions for their uploads.

Whatever the reason, the result is the same: the video has no subtitle track, and nothing inside YouTube's own player can create one for you.

How to get subtitles on a video that doesn't have them

You have four realistic options as a viewer. Three of them exist mostly to be ruled out.

Ask the creator to add captions

The official answer, and the least practical one. Most creators never see the request, and even well-meaning ones rarely go back to caption old uploads. If you need the video today, this isn't a plan.

Use your browser's Live Caption

Chrome and Edge can generate live captions for any audio playing in the tab. It genuinely works — but it's built for accessibility, not learning. Captions appear in a floating box with a delay, English works best with only a short list of other languages supported, there's no translation into your language, and nothing is saved: pause or rewind and the text is gone. As a quick accessibility aid it's fine; as a way to actually study a video, it isn't.

Download the video and run it through a subtitle generator

Creator tools like Kapwing or Clipchamp will transcribe a video you upload. For someone else's YouTube video that means downloading it first — a grey zone under YouTube's terms of service — then waiting for the upload, the processing, and watching the result inside an editor instead of on YouTube. It works, technically. It's also fifteen minutes of friction for every video.

Use an extension that generates subtitles in place

This is the option the other guides miss, because until recently it didn't exist. Linglass is a free browser extension that transcribes caption-less YouTube videos for you: open the video, and it generates clean, readable subtitles right in the player — plus a translation line underneath, so you get proper dual subtitles even on a video that had nothing at all.

How Linglass adds subtitles to a video with no captions

1. Install Linglass from the Chrome Web Store (Chrome, Edge, Brave, Opera and other Chromium browsers) and create a free account.
2. Pick your two languages once: the language you're learning and your native one.
3. Open the video. If it has no captions, Linglass starts transcribing it automatically — you'll see the status right in the player.

A few honest expectations:

• The first time takes a few minutes. Speech recognition runs on the full audio, so a fresh video needs a moment. Once it's done, the subtitles are ready instantly for anyone who opens that video later.
• It's included in the free plan, with an allowance of caption-less videos each month — enough to cover the occasional video that has nothing. Premium raises the limit.
• You get the full learning setup, not bare text. The generated subtitles behave like any other track in Linglass: original line on top, translation below, click any word to translate it in context, hear it pronounced, and save it as a flashcard.

The CC button works, but the captions are rough?

That's the other common case, and it's a different problem. If the button is there but all you get is a wall of lowercase words with no punctuation, the video has auto-generated captions — YouTube made them, and they arrive as a near-continuous stream with awkward line breaks. Linglass re-segments those into readable lines automatically, and adds the translation underneath.

And if your actual goal is two languages on screen at once — the original plus your own — that's YouTube's other missing feature, covered in our guide to dual subtitles on YouTube.

Does this work on the YouTube mobile app?

No. Browser extensions only run in desktop browsers, so there's no way to generate subtitles inside the YouTube app on a phone or tablet. If a video has no captions, the mobile app has no fix for it at all — this is a desktop solution.

Frequently asked questions

Why does YouTube say "No captions are available for this video"?

Because the video has no subtitle track at all: the creator didn't upload one, and YouTube's automatic captioning didn't process the video — usually because the language isn't supported, the audio is too noisy or musical, or the creator disabled captions. No viewer-side setting can restore them, because there is nothing to show.

How do I get subtitles on a YouTube video that doesn't have them?

Use a browser extension that generates them. Linglass transcribes caption-less videos automatically: install it, create a free account, pick your languages and open the video — it produces readable subtitles in the player, with a translation line below. The alternatives — asking the creator, browser live captions, or downloading the video into a subtitle generator — are slower and lose the translation.

Is there an extension that adds subtitles to YouTube videos without captions?

Yes. Linglass is a free extension for Chrome, Edge and other Chromium browsers that generates subtitles for YouTube videos that have none, directly on the page. It was built for language learners, so the generated track comes with dual subtitles, click-to-translate and flashcards rather than plain text.

Can I add captions to someone else's YouTube video?

Not through YouTube itself — viewers can't publish captions for videos they don't own. What you can do is generate subtitles for your own viewing: an extension like Linglass transcribes the video locally to your session and shows the result in the player. The video itself is untouched; the subtitles are yours.

Are AI-generated subtitles accurate enough for language learning?

For clear speech, yes — modern speech recognition is very close to human transcription on podcasts, interviews and vlogs. Heavy background music, overlapping speakers or strong dialects lower the quality. Linglass also segments the lines to match natural sentence boundaries, which matters more for learning than a perfect word rate: you read complete thoughts, not fragments.

Does it cost anything?

Generating subtitles for caption-less videos is part of the Linglass free plan, with a monthly allowance that covers occasional videos. If you regularly watch channels that never caption their uploads, premium raises the limit.

Quick recap

• "No captions are available" means the video has no subtitle track and YouTube didn't auto-caption it. Nothing in your settings can fix that.
• Asking the creator, live captions and download-and-transcribe all technically exist — and all fail the "I just want to watch this video now, in my language" test.
• Linglass generates readable subtitles for caption-less YouTube videos right in the player, with a translation line underneath — free account, a few minutes for a fresh video, instant afterwards.
• On mobile there's no solution at all; this is a desktop-browser fix.

A missing caption track used to mean skipping the video. Now it means waiting a couple of minutes.