How to convert a subtitle file
- Drop the file on the left box, press Choose file, or paste the text straight in. The tool reads the format from the contents, so a file with the wrong extension still works.
- Pick the output on the right: SRT, VTT, SBV or TXT. The converted text updates as you switch.
- Press Download. The new file keeps your original name with the new extension. Copy puts the text on your clipboard instead.
If you paste text and see a red notice, the tool couldn't find a single timing line in it. Check that the file is a text subtitle and not, say, a Word document with subtitles typed into it.
SRT to VTT, and when you need it
The most common reason to convert srt to vtt is the web. The HTML <track> element only reads WebVTT,
as MDN documents, so a
video you host on your own site needs a .vtt file even if every other platform took your .srt. Vimeo and many course players also
list VTT as their preferred format.
The change itself is small. Here is the same cue in both formats:
1
00:00:04,200 --> 00:00:07,000
Welcome back to the channel.WEBVTT
00:00:04.200 --> 00:00:07.000
Welcome back to the channel.
VTT adds the WEBVTT header, drops the cue number (it's optional in VTT), and uses a period before the milliseconds.
Doing that by hand with find and replace is easy to get wrong, because a comma also appears inside the subtitle text itself.
VTT to SRT for editors and social platforms
Going the other way is just as common. Zoom, Teams, YouTube's caption download and many web players hand you VTT, while LinkedIn,
Facebook and most video editors want SRT. A vtt to srt conversion numbers the cues from 1, switches the millisecond separator to a
comma, and strips VTT-only extras that SRT readers don't understand: NOTE and STYLE blocks, cue settings
like align:start, and voice tags like <v Ana>. The words inside a voice tag are kept.
YouTube SBV to SRT
SBV is YouTube's own caption format, and one of the file types YouTube Studio offers when you download captions. It has no cue numbers and puts both times on one line, separated by a
comma: 0:00:04.200,0:00:07.000. Few tools outside YouTube open it, so sbv to srt is a common first step after downloading
captions from YouTube Studio. You can also convert the other way if you have an SRT and a workflow that expects SBV.
SRT to TXT for a clean transcript
Pick TXT and you get only the words: one cue per line, no numbers, no timecodes. That's handy for show notes, a blog post drafted from a video, a quote you need to check, or pasting the script into a document for review. It works the same for vtt to txt, which is the quick way to tidy up a meeting transcript. Keep the original subtitle file, though, because a TXT can't be turned back into timed subtitles.
What the converter keeps and what it drops
| Kept | Dropped |
|---|---|
| Every cue's start and end time, to the millisecond | Italic, bold and color tags |
| The words, including line breaks inside a cue | VTT positions and cue settings |
| Cue order (cues are sorted by start time) | VTT NOTE, STYLE and REGION blocks |
| UTF-8 text, so accents and non-Latin scripts survive | Empty cues and cues whose end comes before their start |
For a longer comparison of SRT, VTT, SBV, ASS and the broadcast formats, read our guide to subtitle formats. If you need to change the words or fix timing that's off by a second or two, open the file in the subtitle editor instead. It can shift every cue at once and save the result in any of these formats.