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 puts any video into a floating Picture-in-Picture window — and brings the subtitles with it. Most PiP extensions drop your subtitles the moment the video floats. Captiv doesn't. It reads the subtitle track that's already enabled in the player and mirrors it into the floating window automatically. No re-enabling. No copy-paste. No setup. Just click the toolbar button (or press Alt+P) and your video floats — subtitles and all. ——— WHY CAPTIV ——— If you watch videos with subtitles and want to multitask — reading an article, writing in another tab, or just keeping a video on screen while you work — you've hit the same wall: the moment you pop the video out, the subtitles vanish. Chrome's built-in PiP has no subtitle support. Other extensions ignore the problem entirely. Captiv exists to fix exactly that. ——— WHAT IT DOES ——— ▸ Picture-in-Picture with subtitles Pop a video into a floating window that stays on top of every other tab and app. The subtitles you already had enabled in the player appear in the floating window — automatically. ▸ Works across the web Captiv isn't built for one platform. It works wherever a website plays video and the player exposes its subtitles — streaming sites, course platforms, news sites, sports streams, embedded players, and more. There's no fixed list of supported sites. ▸ Works inside embedded players too Many sites load their video player inside a separate embedded frame — a technical boundary that breaks most extensions. Captiv handles this transparently. It detects the video wherever it lives on the page and brings the subtitles through. ▸ Full playback controls in the floating window Play and pause, skip back and forward 10 seconds, and scrub the timeline — right from the Picture-in-Picture window, without returning to the tab. ▸ Automatic subtitle detection Captiv reads the subtitle track the player is already using. If you have English subtitles turned on in the video player, those same subtitles appear in the PiP window. There's nothing to configure, no subtitle file to upload, and no account to create. ▸ One click or one shortcut Click the Captiv icon in your Chrome toolbar. Or press Alt+P. That's the entire workflow. Click again to close PiP and return the video to the page. ▸ Customise how subtitles look Open Captiv's settings page to 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 change each setting. ——— WHO IS IT FOR ——— → Language learners who need subtitles visible while taking notes in another window → People who watch lectures or courses while doing other work → Anyone who watches foreign-language content with subtitles enabled → People with hearing difficulties who rely on captions → Anyone who has ever lost their subtitles the moment they clicked PiP ——— 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 subtitle track active in the original player and composites those cues together with the video so they travel into the PiP window as one stream. When the player updates the subtitle text, the PiP window updates too, in real time. A note on limits: subtitles can only be mirrored when the player exposes them as a readable track. Some players render captions baked into the video image, and protected (DRM) videos can't be composited — in those cases Captiv still opens Picture-in-Picture, just without the subtitle overlay. No servers involved. Everything happens 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 thing it stores is your subtitle display preferences (font, size, color), saved locally in your browser 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 EXPLAINED ——— Captiv requests access to all websites. This is required for its core purpose: detecting the video and reading the active subtitle track on any page you visit, including pages that load their video 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. You can read every line of code at: https://github.com/y000yal/subly