Paste a YouTube or Facebook link and watch it your way — turn the picture in 90° steps so you can lie on your side, control the volume, go fullscreen, and get captions that actually show up on iPhone — YouTube's own, plus your own subtitle files.
That's a Facebook share link. We've tried it anyway, but Facebook
often won't resolve fb.watch/… or facebook.com/share/…
for embedding. If nothing plays, open it on Facebook and copy the full address
from your browser bar — it'll look like
facebook.com/watch/?v=123456 — then paste that instead.
Facebook only embeds videos whose original post is public. If this shows "video unavailable", the post is private, friends-only, or the owner has turned embedding off — nothing on this page can change that. Open it on Facebook ↗
Shortcuts — R rotate right, Shift+R rotate left, F fullscreen, Space play/pause, M mute, ↑/↓ volume, C pin controls, [ / ] nudge subtitles. Double-click the picture for fullscreen.
In fullscreen the controls hide themselves — move the mouse, tap, or press any key to bring them back.
For YouTube, use the Captions menu in the control bar above — those are YouTube's own tracks and they keep working on iPhone here. Load a .srt or .vtt file instead when a video has no captions of its own, or for Facebook. Loaded lines are drawn by this page, so they turn with the picture when you rotate it.
Facebook's embedded player doesn't report its position, so start this clock when you press play there and nudge with the sync buttons.
— or paste subtitle text —
🔒 The video streams straight from YouTube or Facebook to your browser, exactly as on their own site. Subtitle files you load are read on your device and never uploaded.
Turn the picture 90° so a laptop propped beside the sofa or bed reads the right way up when your head is on its side.
Playback is forced to stay inline and fullscreen is handled here, so YouTube's own captions keep rendering on iOS Safari instead of vanishing.
Someone filmed a whole clip with the phone the wrong way round. Rotate it back instead of tilting your monitor.
YouTube draws its captions itself, as part of its own player, inside its own frame. On a desktop that simply works. On an iPhone it works too — right up until the moment iOS decides to take the video out of the page and play it in the system's own fullscreen player. At that point the operating system is drawing the video, not the web page, and the caption layer that belonged to the page is simply gone. That is the entire bug, and it is why captions on the same video behave differently on a phone than on a laptop.
Two things stop that handover. The first is asking for inline playback explicitly, so iOS keeps the video in the frame instead of promoting it to the system player. The second is not offering the player's own fullscreen button as the way to go fullscreen, because pressing it on an iPhone is precisely the handover that loses the captions. Fullscreen here is applied to the player's whole shell — picture, controls and all — which the page keeps drawing itself.
With both in place, YouTube's real caption tracks keep rendering on an iPhone, and the caption menu in the control bar lists whatever languages the video actually offers. The menu stays empty until playback begins, which is not an oversight: the player exposes no track list at all until media has started loading, so there is genuinely nothing to show before then.
The subtitle-file loader is the separate, guaranteed path. It parses a file you supply and draws the lines in this page's own elements, so it does not depend on any platform behaviour — and it is the only option for a video that has no captions of its own. It cannot be filled from YouTube's tracks: caption text is not exposed by the player's interface, and the endpoint that serves it is not reachable from a browser.
Turning a video 90° inside a screen of the same shape always costs you size, and it is worth knowing why before assuming something is broken. A widescreen video is roughly 16 units across for every 9 tall. Stand it on its end and it becomes 9 across for every 16 tall, while the screen it has to fit inside is still the wide way round. The height of the screen now limits the long side of the picture, so the video ends up occupying a tall strip through the middle with empty space either side.
That is geometry rather than a limitation of the player: no arrangement makes a rotated widescreen picture fill a widescreen screen. The player already sizes the turned frame as large as it can possibly go, which is why fullscreen is worth using once rotated — a bigger screen means a bigger strip.
Fullscreen here is applied to the whole player rather than to the video frame, which matters more than it sounds. Handing the screen directly to the platform's frame would take the rotation and the subtitle layer with it, since both belong to this page and not to theirs. On iPhone, where a page cannot request true fullscreen for anything other than a video element, the player falls back to filling the screen with ordinary layout instead — visually the same, and it keeps everything this page draws.
A subtitle file is timed against one specific copy of a video. Re-uploads, regional cuts and versions with different intros all shift the timing, so a file that is perfect for one copy can run consistently early or late on another. This is the usual reason subtitles that "don't work" are in fact working and simply displaced.
The fix is a single offset applied to every line at once. Find a moment where someone clearly says something, note whether the text arrives before or after, and nudge in half-second steps until the two meet. Drift that grows over the length of a video is a different problem — that means the two copies run at different frame rates, and no fixed offset will hold across the whole thing.
Both common formats are accepted. SubRip files, ending .srt, number each line and separate the timestamps with commas; WebVTT files, ending .vtt, start with a WEBVTT header and use dots. The difference is cosmetic and the parser here takes either without being told which is which. If you need to convert or clean up subtitle text first, the subtitle editor handles that, and OCR can pull text out of hard-burned captions.
Yes — the rotate buttons turn it in 90° steps either way, and the rotation is kept in fullscreen. Press R for a quick turn.
Because iOS usually moves the video into the system fullscreen player, and YouTube's caption layer belongs to the web page, so it disappears with the handover. This player forces playback to stay inline and provides its own fullscreen instead, so YouTube's real captions keep working. Pick a language from the Captions menu once playback has started.
YouTube exposes no track list until playback has actually begun, so the menu fills in a second or two after you press play. If it then says the video has no captions, that video genuinely has none — load a subtitle file instead.
Any subtitle file works — one that came with a download, one you wrote, or one exported from another tool. You can also paste the text directly. Nothing is uploaded.
Yes, for any Facebook video left publicly embeddable by its owner. Private videos and ones with embedding disabled can't play on any site but Facebook.
Vertical video needs a vertical frame. Reels and Shorts are detected automatically, but if a video still doesn't fit, set Frame to 9:16 (or whatever matches) and use the zoom slider to fine-tune. Reset puts everything back.
A widescreen picture stood on its end is limited by the height of your screen, so it becomes a tall strip. That's geometry, not a bug — going fullscreen gives it the most room available.
Two causes. Either it's a share short-link — fb.watch/… or facebook.com/share/v/… — which Facebook's own player refuses to follow: open it on Facebook and copy the full address instead. Or the video's original post isn't public, in which case it can't be embedded anywhere by anyone.
They hide themselves so the video gets the whole screen. Move the mouse, tap, or press any key to bring them back, and press C to pin them open.
A /live address isn't a video — it's a page that shows whatever is streaming at that moment, so there's nothing to embed. Once a stream starts it gets its own link; open it on Facebook and copy that, and it'll look like facebook.com/watch/?v=123456.
Facebook videos start muted, because browsers only allow autoplay without sound. Press Unmute and the embed reloads with audio — that reload is the only way to unmute a Facebook embed, since Facebook exposes no player controls to the page. Its own volume slider inside the frame works too.
No. The video streams from YouTube or Facebook to your browser exactly as it would on their site, and subtitle files are read locally.
The file was timed against a different copy of the video. Use the −0.5s / +0.5s buttons to shift every line at once until they match.