VTT to SRT converter

Everything WebVTT can express beyond the words and their timings is removed, because SRT has no specification for any of it. That means cue settings for position and alignment, STYLE blocks carrying CSS, region definitions, NOTE comments, class tags and voice tags all go. Keeping them would produce a file that is not valid SRT and that each player would then interpret differently or refuse outright.

Some players do honour a handful of HTML tags inside SRT, commonly italic, bold, underline and a font colour tag. That behaviour is a convention rather than part of any standard, and it varies by player and by version. Building a workflow on it means captions that look correct in VLC and wrong in the editing suite, so the safer position is to let the editor apply styling to the subtitle track after import, which is what editors are built to do.

One loss is worth acting on before you convert. If the WebVTT used voice tags to mark who is speaking, those speaker names disappear completely, because the name lives inside the tag rather than in the caption text. When a transcript has two or more speakers and the names matter, rewrite them into the visible text first, in the form of the name followed by a colon at the start of the line. It takes a find and replace and it survives every format from that point on.

WebVTT allows a timestamp to omit the hour when the cue falls in the first hour, so 04:31.200 is legal and means four minutes and thirty one seconds. SRT parsers expect hours, minutes, seconds and milliseconds every time. This is the most common reason a hand edited file imports with no captions and no error message, and the converter expands every short timestamp to the full form rather than passing it through.

Cue numbering is the second one. WebVTT cues can be unnumbered, or carry a text identifier instead of a number. SRT expects plain integers counting up from one with no gaps. A file that keeps text identifiers, or that skips numbers because cues were deleted by hand, causes some players to stop rendering at the first gap and give no reason. Renumbering from one is part of the conversion for exactly that reason.

The decimal separator is the difference everyone knows about and it is genuinely trivial: a full stop becomes a comma. It is worth saying plainly that this alone is not what breaks files. If a converted file misbehaves, the timestamp form and the numbering are the places to look first.

Video editors are the main reason this conversion exists. Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve and CapCut all import SRT dependably, while WebVTT support differs between versions and sometimes between the desktop and mobile builds of the same product. When a deadline depends on the file opening, SRT is the format that opens.

Command line work leans the same way. Burning subtitles permanently into a video with ffmpeg is most direct from an SRT file, and the tooling around it assumes that format. Broadcast and localisation suppliers generally specify SRT in their delivery requirements as well.

If you are converting because a platform rejected WebVTT, it is worth reading our SRT to VTT guide in the other direction first. It documents the reasons a valid WebVTT file fails to display, several of which have nothing to do with the file and are fixed in a minute once you know where to look.