Right-click any video → caption it
The BurnSub browser extension adds "Burn subtitles in BurnSub" to your right-click menu on every HTML5 video on the web. One click → your video opens in the editor.
Right-click a video
Adds a menu item to any HTML5 video. Direct video files load straight into the editor when the host allows it.
Shortcut to the editor
Opens BurnSub in a new tab, ready to caption — with the video already loading, or an empty drop zone.
Privacy-first
Extension reads no page content. Just adds a context-menu item. Zero analytics.
Install (developer mode, today)
- Download burnsub-extension.zip and unzip it
- Open
chrome://extensions(oredge://extensions) - Toggle Developer mode on (top-right)
- Click Load unpacked → select the
extension/folder - The 🔥 BurnSub icon appears in your toolbar — done
Read the source
The extension is short and unminified. Read it before installing if you want — that's the whole point. No bundlers, no obfuscation. These are the exact files inside the zip, served as plain text:
- manifest.json — Manifest V3 declaration
- background.js — Service worker registering context-menu items
- popup.html — Toolbar popup
The whole of BurnSub — extension and site — is on GitHub under the MIT licence: github.com/Xley9/burnsub.
What the extension does NOT do
- Read any page content beyond the right-clicked video URL
- Track your browsing
- Inject scripts into any page
- Send any data anywhere — it just opens a BurnSub URL with a query param
It requests exactly one permission: contextMenus. No host access, no
activeTab — it never needs to look at the page you are on.
Where it can't help
Streaming players on YouTube, Vimeo, X and most large video sites feed the browser
through Media Source Extensions, so the video element's source is a
blob: URL that only exists inside that page. No extension can hand that
to another site — it is not a limitation we can engineer around. The same applies when
a host blocks cross-origin reads of its files.
In those cases BurnSub says so instead of failing silently, and you can save the video and drop it in. Direct video files, self-hosted clips and your own pages generally work.