Subtitle converter: SRT, VTT, ASS and plain text

How to convert subtitle files

1. Click Choose subtitle files and select one or more .srt, .vtt, .ass or .ssa files, or use Paste subtitle text. The format is detected from the content, so a file with the wrong extension still works.
2. Leave Input encoding on Auto. If accented or Cyrillic letters come out garbled, choose the encoding by hand, for example Windows-1252 for older Western European files or Windows-1251 for older Cyrillic ones.
3. Choose the output format: SRT, WebVTT, ASS or Plain text.
4. Set the options. Renumber and sort cues is on by default. Turn on Fix YouTube auto-caption doubling for captions downloaded from YouTube. Change Line endings or Add UTF-8 BOM only if the program you're feeding needs it.
5. Read the What changed report. It lists what was fixed, which malformed cues were skipped (with their line numbers) and how much styling was dropped.
6. Download each converted file, or click Download all (.zip) if you converted several.

Plain text and ASS output

For a transcript, choose Plain text. Keep timestamps keeps each cue's timing in the text, and Join lines into paragraphs merges broken caption lines into running text you can paste into a document or a video description. For ASS, set Font size and Position: bottom/top. Every line gets one default style, white text with a black outline, which you can restyle in a subtitle editor. To design the style on your own video first, with your font, a word highlight and short captions, use the caption style previewer.

Fix Premiere's "generic error" on SRT import

Premiere Pro sometimes rejects an SRT with the message "The importer reported a generic error". In a long Adobe Community thread about this error, the fix that worked was saving the file as UTF-8 with LF line endings. Other replies traced it to non-Latin text and small syntax mistakes. This converter writes UTF-8 with LF line endings by default, renumbers the cues, removes empty ones and fixes cues that end before they start. Run the problem file through with SRT as the output and import the new file. In Premiere, import it like any media file, then drag it from the Project panel into your sequence to create a caption track.

Fix doubled YouTube auto-captions

YouTube's automatic captions roll. Each cue repeats the previous line above the new one, and the cue times overlap. That looks right on YouTube, but in an editor every line appears twice. Turn on Fix YouTube auto-caption doubling and the tool rebuilds the track so each line appears once, in cues that don't overlap. The option is off by default so that normal subtitles are left alone.

Which format does each program want?

What gets lost between formats

• ASS to SRT or WebVTT: italic, bold and underline survive as <i>, <b> and <u>, and line breaks are kept. Positions, colors, fonts, karaoke timing and drawings are removed, and comment lines are skipped. The What changed report counts what was dropped.
• WebVTT to SRT: cue settings (position and alignment) and cue IDs are removed, NOTE, STYLE and REGION blocks are skipped, and voice, class, language and ruby tags are stripped. Bold, italic and underline stay.
• SRT or WebVTT to ASS: text and timing carry over, and every line uses the one default style set by Font size and Position.

Limits

• It converts text and timing. It doesn't translate, transcribe or sync subtitles to the audio. For timing problems, use the subtitle shifter.
• It reads SRT, WebVTT, ASS and SSA. SBV, TTML/DFXP, SCC and STL aren't supported. Image-based subtitles (SUP, IDX/SUB) can't be converted because they contain pictures of text.
• If a file has no byte-order mark and isn't valid UTF-8, Auto falls back to another encoding and tells you. If letters still look wrong, set Input encoding by hand.
• Malformed cues are skipped and reported with their line number, so you can fix them in a text editor.

Your files stay on your device

Subtitle files are read and converted by your browser on your computer. Nothing is uploaded, and there's no daily limit or sign-up.