Subtitling Subtitling provides a written representation of the audio portion of a program. Video, subtitles are "burned in" and will always appear when the video plays. Subtitles are created with a character generator; no decoding capability is required for viewing them. Subtitles are usually in upper- and lower-case letters and do not normally appear in a black background. Also, subtitles are typically placed at the bottom center of the screen.