Captiv — PiP with Subtitles That Just Works

Watch any video in Picture-in-Picture with the site's own subtitles shown in the floating window. Works on every site.

Captiv – Picture in Picture with Subtitles | PiP Captions for Any Video Watch any video in a floating Picture-in-Picture window — with subtitles. Captiv is the only Chrome extension that keeps your captions visible when you pop a video out of the page. Chrome's built-in PiP drops subtitles the moment the video floats. Captiv fixes that. It reads the active subtitle or closed caption track from the video player and mirrors it into the floating PiP window automatically — no setup, no re-enabling, no subtitle files to upload. Click the toolbar icon or press Alt+P. Your video floats. Your subtitles come with it. ——— WHY CAPTIV ——— If you watch videos with subtitles and want to multitask — reading, writing in another tab, or keeping a video on screen while you work — you've hit the same wall: pop the video out and the captions vanish. Chrome's Picture-in-Picture has no subtitle support. Other PiP extensions ignore the problem entirely. Captiv exists to fix exactly that. ——— FEATURES ——— ▸ Picture-in-Picture with subtitles and captions A floating PiP window that keeps your subtitles on screen — automatically. Works with closed captions (CC), foreign-language subtitles, and any text track the player exposes. ▸ Works on any website with video Captiv isn't locked to one platform. It works wherever a site plays video — streaming services, online courses, news sites, sports streams, and embedded players. No fixed list of supported sites. ▸ Works inside iframes and embedded players Many sites load their video player in a separate embedded frame — a boundary that breaks most extensions. Captiv detects the video wherever it lives on the page, including cross-origin iframes, and brings the captions through. ▸ Full playback controls in the floating window Play/pause, skip back and forward 10 seconds, and scrub the timeline — all from the PiP window, without switching tabs. ▸ Automatic subtitle detection — nothing to configure Captiv reads the subtitle or caption track the player is already using. If English subtitles are on in the video player, those same captions appear in the floating window. No account, no file upload, no configuration. ▸ One click or one keyboard shortcut Click the Captiv icon in the Chrome toolbar, or press Alt+P. That's the entire workflow. Click again to close PiP and return the video to the page. ▸ Customisable subtitle appearance Adjust font size, font family, text color, background color, background opacity, subtitle position (top or bottom), and edge style (drop shadow, outline, or none). A live preview updates as you type. ——— WHO IS IT FOR ——— → Language learners who need subtitles visible while taking notes in a separate window → Students watching lectures or online courses while multitasking → Anyone watching foreign-language content with subtitles enabled → People who rely on closed captions or accessibility captions → Anyone who has ever lost their captions the moment they clicked Picture-in-Picture ——— HOW IT WORKS ——— When you activate Captiv, it detects the video on the page — including inside embedded players — and opens a floating Picture-in-Picture window. It reads the active subtitle track from the original player and composites those captions with the video stream so they travel into the PiP window together. When the player updates the subtitle text, the floating window updates in real time. Limits: subtitles can only be mirrored when the player exposes them as a readable text track. Some players render captions baked into the video image, and DRM-protected videos can't be composited — in those cases Captiv still opens Picture-in-Picture, just without the subtitle overlay. No servers. Everything runs locally in your browser. ——— PRIVACY ——— Captiv collects no data. It does not track what you watch, where you browse, or what subtitles appear on screen. The only data it stores is your subtitle display preferences (font, size, color), saved locally using Chrome's storage API. Nothing ever leaves your device. No account required. No sign-in. No analytics. Full privacy policy: https://github.com/y000yal/subly/blob/master/PRIVACY.md ——— PERMISSIONS ——— Captiv requests access to all websites. This is required for its core purpose: detecting the video and reading the active subtitle or caption track on any page, including pages that load their player inside an embedded frame from a different domain. Without this permission, Captiv would only work on a fixed list of sites — which defeats the point. The injected code is completely inert until you activate the extension by clicking the toolbar button or pressing Alt+P. ——— OPEN SOURCE ——— Captiv is open source. Every line of code is public at: https://github.com/y000yal/subly