SRT to VTT Converter

Why SRT will not play in a browser

SubRip and WebVTT look almost identical, and that is exactly what makes the failure confusing: you attach an .srt to a <track> element, the video plays, and no subtitles appear. There is no error. HTML5 video does not read SubRip at all — it reads WebVTT, and the two differ in two small ways that a player will not forgive.

The two differences that matter

First, a WebVTT file must begin with the word WEBVTT on its own line. Without that header the file is rejected outright, whatever is inside it. Second, WebVTT separates seconds from milliseconds with a period and SubRip uses a comma: 00:00:01.500 against 00:00:01,500. Cue numbers, which SubRip puts above every block, are optional in WebVTT and are dropped here — they carry no meaning and only add noise.

What the conversion does and does not touch

Timings are copied across exactly; nothing is rounded, shifted or re-timed. Line breaks inside a cue survive, so a two-line subtitle stays two lines. What is not carried over is anything SubRip never had: WebVTT can hold cue settings for position, alignment and region, and this converter does not invent them. You get a clean, valid file with default positioning, which is what a browser wants in the overwhelming majority of cases.

It runs on your machine

The file is read and converted in the browser. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is stored, and there is no account. Files up to 10 MB are accepted, which is far more than any subtitle file needs — a feature-length film usually lands under 100 KB.