YouTube captions/subtitles displayed by default in Interactive Video, with no way to disable them

Submitted by maurel on Sun, 08/23/2026 - 16:55
Forums: 
Bugs in content types

Subject: YouTube captions/subtitles displayed by default in Interactive Video, with no way to disable them

Hi,

I'm running a self-hosted Moodle 5.2 site with core H5P support (mod_h5pactivity), and I'm seeing YouTube captions/subtitles automatically displayed when playing an Interactive Video content, even though:

  • Captions are not enabled by default on the source video when watched directly on youtube.com
  • I haven't uploaded or configured any subtitle track in the H5P Interactive Video editor
  • The behavior is not tied to my browser, OS, or Google/YouTube account — I've ruled out:
    • Personal YouTube caption preference (tested in an incognito/private window — still happens)
    • Chrome's "Live Caption" accessibility feature (tested in Firefox — still happens)
    • Windows' OS-level "Live Captions" feature (doesn't happen when watching the same video directly on youtube.com, so it's not a system-wide overlay)

This points to the behavior coming from the H5P/YouTube integration itself. Looking briefly at the h5p-video YouTube wrapper, I noticed it calls player.loadModule('captions') on player initialization — is it possible this (or a related call) is also setting a default caption track, causing captions to display even when the video's own default state (outside H5P) doesn't show them?

Is this a known issue? Is there any existing way (setting, filter, or parameter) to prevent captions from being force-enabled in Interactive Video when using a YouTube source? If not, could this be considered as a feature request — a simple toggle to disable auto-captions for YouTube sources would be very useful.

Happy to provide more details (Moodle version, H5P core version, a sample video ID) if that helps track this down.

 

Thanks!

Content types: 
Interactive Video