VTT to SRT — WebVTT subtitles for players and TVs
Convert a WebVTT .vtt file to .srt that every player, TV and video editor reads — positions, italics and YouTube auto-captions handled properly.
About this conversion
VTT is what web video, YouTube and online courses use; SRT is what TVs, VLC and video editors expect. The two are close, which is why naive converters only swap the comma in the times — and leave in the speaker tags, the styling blocks and, for YouTube auto-captions, every phrase three times over as the text rolls up. Here the tags are taken out of the text, a line placed at the top stays at the top, and the rolling repeats of auto-captions are dropped so each phrase appears once. SRT has no place for speaker names from a Teams or Zoom transcript — for those, save it as a Word transcript instead, which puts each name in bold.
Just want to look inside it?
The same tool without converting anything: open the file and read it.
Fix it before you save it
The file stays open after it is read, so the format is picked at the end: the same subtitles can leave here as ASS, SBV, SUB (MicroDVD), TTML / DFXP, SAMI (.smi), LRC, TXT, Word, Excel or PDF. Before that you can move every line earlier or later, stretch the timing to a different release of the film, remove [DOOR SLAMS] and speaker names, put a second language under the first, and see which lines break the rules studios follow — too long, too fast, overlapping.
Questions
- My VTT is from YouTube’s automatic captions.
- Those repeat every phrase as the captions roll. The repeats are recognised and dropped; the note above the table says so.
- Is anything lost?
- Fonts and sizes from a STYLE block have no place in SRT. The text, the times, italics and top-of-screen positions are kept.