Google temporarily disabled YouTube's advanced captions without warning

YouTubers have been increasingly frustrated with Google’s management of the platform, with disinformation welcomed back and an aggressive push for more AI (except where Google doesn’t like it). So it’s no surprise that creators have been up in arms over the suspicious removal of YouTube’s advanced SRV3 caption format. You don’t have to worry too much just yet—Google says this is only temporary, and it’s working on a fix for the underlying bug.

Google added support for this custom subtitle format around 2018, giving creators more customization options than with traditional captions. SRV3 (also known as YTT or YouTube Timed Text) allows for custom colors, transparency, animations, fonts, and precise positioning in videos. Uploaders using this format can color-code and position captions to help separate multiple speakers, create sing-along animations, or style them to match the video.

Over the last several days, creators who have become accustomed to this level of control have been dismayed to see that YouTube is no longer accepting videos with this Google-created format. Many worried Google had ditched the format entirely, which could be problematic for all those previously uploaded videos.

Google has now posted a brief statement and confirmed to Ars that it has not ended support for SRV3. However, all is not well. The company says it has temporarily limited the serving of SRV3 caption files because they may break playback for some users. That’s pretty vague, but it sounds like developers made a change to the platform without taking into account how it might interfere with SRV3 captions. Rather than allow those videos to be non-functional, it’s disabling most of the captions.

SRV3 example — An example of SRV3 caption formatting. Credit: Hololive

Google’s forum post says that while SRV3 is disabled, creators will not be able to upload new SRV3 captions. Videos that already have them may not show any captions until the feature is restored. However, Google notes most uploaders use other caption formats and are not affected by the playback bug.

Interestingly, Google also notes that the changes should be temporary for almost all videos. That implies some features of SRV3 may not be fully supported with whatever Google is doing on the back end. The company makes no promises about a timeline to re-enable SRV3—creators who have relied heavily on it may have to go back and re-create their captions in less capable formats or simply rely on AI-generated captions in the meantime.

Regardless of whether Google knew this would happen, it shouldn’t have left the community to stew about it for a week. This also suggests Google isn’t very serious about supporting its in-house CC format, which it has opted not to officially document. Creators should probably factor that into their future plans.