Subtitles for video (SRT and VTT)
Which of the two to use, how to load them into an editor or YouTube, and how to fix drift.
Both formats are plain text files holding the same thing: lines of dialogue with a start and end time. They need Standard or Premium.
- SRT — the safe default. Every video editor, YouTube, Vimeo and most players read it.
- VTT — the web standard, and what you want for an HTML5 `<track>` element. It also allows styling that SRT cannot express.
If you are unsure, take SRT. Converting SRT to VTT later is trivial; the other direction can lose styling.
Using the file
- 1Edit the transcript first. Fixing a name afterwards means fixing it in the subtitle file by hand.
- 2Download SRT or VTT from the transcript view.
- 3In a video editor, import it as a subtitle or caption track.
- 4On YouTube, open Subtitles for the video and upload the file — it lines up automatically because the timings came from the same audio.
If the subtitles drift
Drift almost always means the video is not the file we transcribed. Re-encoding, trimming an intro, or exporting at a different frame rate all shift the timeline. Export subtitles against the same cut you uploaded, or upload the final cut and transcribe that.
Pro Tip
Speaker labels carry into subtitle files, which is worth turning on for interviews and panels.
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