Captions downloaded from a streaming service
Browser-based players use WebVTT, so that is what a download gives you. Video editing software almost always wants SubRip instead.
VTT to SRT
Convert WebVTT captions to SubRip .srt for VLC, editing software and services that require SRT.
Maintained by Roshan.
Use VTT to SRT
Turns a WebVTT .vtt file into SubRip for desktop players and editors. The file is read in this tab and never uploaded.
Renaming the file does not workSRT writes milliseconds after a comma and WebVTT after a period, and WebVTT additionally requires a WEBVTT header line. A player given the wrong one usually shows no subtitles at all rather than an error.
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Browse all text toolsAbout VTT to SRT
WebVTT files are what you end up with after downloading captions from a streaming platform or exporting from a browser-based editor, and SubRip is what a surprising amount of other software still demands. Video editing suites, broadcast workflows, older set-top players and many transcription services accept .srt and nothing else. Converting in this direction is mostly a simplification: SubRip is the more limited of the two formats, so the work is deciding what to do with the features that have no equivalent. WebVTT can position a caption anywhere on screen, assign it to a named speaker, style it with CSS and group cues into regions. SubRip can do none of that. Rather than dropping those quietly, this converter keeps every word of the dialogue and tells you exactly what was removed.
Work through the input
- The file is read in this tab and normalised: a byte-order mark is removed and line endings are unified so no carriage returns survive inside the text.
- The WEBVTT header, along with any NOTE, STYLE and REGION blocks, is recognised as metadata and discarded rather than mistaken for a caption. A comment turning into on-screen dialogue is the classic failure of a naive converter.
- Timings are parsed into milliseconds. WebVTT allows an abbreviated form without an hours field, so a timestamp like 02:03.456 is expanded to 00:02:03,456 as SubRip requires.
- Cue settings such as alignment and position are separated from the timing line and counted, so the number affected can be reported back to you.
- Cues are renumbered from one and written out with comma-separated milliseconds and no header line.
When vtt to srt is useful
Preparing subtitles for a hardware player
Set-top boxes and older smart televisions generally support SubRip sidecar files and not WebVTT. Match the .srt filename to the video filename so the player finds it automatically.
Check the output
- Positioning and alignment settings are removed, because SubRip has no way to express them. The caption text itself is always preserved, and the count of affected cues is reported.
- WebVTT voice and class tags, which mark up speakers and styling, are stripped. Bold, italic and underline are kept because SubRip players understand them.
- STYLE blocks containing CSS are discarded entirely. There is no SubRip equivalent and no reasonable approximation.
- Timings are unchanged. If the captions were out of sync with the video before, they will still be out of sync afterwards.
- The file is assumed to be UTF-8. Some older SubRip players expect a regional encoding and may show accented characters incorrectly, which is a limitation of those players.
Questions about VTT to SRT
Will I lose any of the dialogue?
No. Every cue's text is preserved. Only the positioning and styling information that SubRip cannot represent is removed, and the tool tells you how many cues that affected.
Why can I not just rename the file?
SubRip parsers expect commas before the milliseconds and no WEBVTT header. A renamed file has both wrong, and most players respond by showing nothing.
What happens to speaker labels?
WebVTT voice tags are removed, since SubRip has no speaker concept. If the speaker name was written into the caption text itself, it stays.
Do the timings shift?
No. They are parsed and re-emitted exactly, with abbreviated timestamps expanded to the full hours-minutes-seconds form SubRip requires.
Does the file leave my computer?
No. Parsing and writing both happen in this tab, which matters for unreleased or confidential material.
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