TikTok subtitle placement
Two regions loaded, one deliberately left out — and why.
What can overlap a subtitle
TikTok overlays a translucent tab row (Following / For You / search) near the top of the video and a vertical action rail (avatar, follow, like, comment, share) down the right edge. Author name, caption text, and the audio ticker sit lower on the left. A subtitle placed high can run into the tab row; one placed toward the right edge can catch the action rail.
What the tool loads for TikTok
In Reference · Organic mode, the active TikTok reference is a first-party capture: a physical Galaxy S20 Ultra, TikTok app 47.0.3, Korean UI, captured 2026-09-23. Of 19 screenshots reviewed, 5 qualified as a plain organic For You feed (standard tabs, no ads, no search or event badges, no carousel, collapsed 2-line caption) and became the base measurement. Confidence is recorded as medium-high.
- Top nav overlay — the tab row and search icon. Unlike the opaque bar above the video in the Reels capture, this row is translucent and drawn on top of the video — the video shows through the tab text — so it does cover part of the frame and is included as a region.
- Action rail — avatar through share icon, cut off where the video frame ends at the bottom.
No caption-row region is loaded, on purpose. In this capture, the author name / caption / audio-ticker block started only about 11 pixels above where the video frame actually ends — essentially all of it renders below the video, in the margin. That's not enough overlap to justify a region, so none was added. This is a finding scoped to this one device, app version, and 5-sample capture — it is not a claim that TikTok captions are always clear of the video.
A note on measurement disagreement
An older, independent measurement of TikTok's action rail (from a different, web-player-based source) reported different coordinates than the first-party capture above. Neither replaces the other automatically — they're kept as separate evidence, and only the first-party one is active in production, because it meets a higher bar (physical device, repeated samples, documented method). The disagreement itself is a useful reminder that a single source, however careful, isn't the last word.
Using it
Switch Data to Reference · Organic, place your Subtitle, and check the TikTok column. Because there's no caption-row region, a subtitle placed where TikTok's own caption normally sits won't be flagged by this tool for that alone — that's a gap in current evidence, not a confirmation that space is clear.
Limitations
- Single device, single session, Korean UI, one app version.
- Caption was 2 lines, collapsed, in every sample; 1-line and expanded ("see more") captions weren't captured.
- The video frame's bottom edge was a soft gradient in this capture, not a hard line — a conservative boundary was chosen rather than an exact one.