Most commonly seen in films requiring foreign language translation, subtitles are displayed as proportionally spaced fonts in typical sentence case. They are usually white and include a drop shadow or border to keep them from being lost in a light background.

Subtitles are not applied to your original master tape; rather, a brand-new subtitled clone or dub is created, on virtually any tape format you require. But unlike closed captions, subtitles are a permanent or "burned in" part of the video and cannot be turned off. There is an exception, though; on a DVD, subtitles can be added as a separate stream that can be turned on or off by the user.