Making Short-Form Video Accessible: Automating Captions with Whisper and FFmpeg

With 85%+ of short-form videos watched without sound, captions are no longer optional for social media success. Soft captions fail on platforms like TikTok and Instagram, making hardcoded captions the only reliable solution. This guide provides a production-ready implementation using OpenAI's Whisper and FFmpeg to automate caption generation in your video pipeline.