SRT vs VTT — Which Subtitle Format Should You Use?
The practical differences between SRT and WebVTT subtitle files, where each one works (YouTube, Vimeo, HTML5, Premiere), and how to convert between them.
SRT and VTT are the two subtitle formats you will meet everywhere. Both are plain text, both store cues with a start time, an end time and some text. The differences are small but matter when you upload the file somewhere.
SRT (SubRip)
1
00:00:01,200 --> 00:00:03,360
All right, so here we are, in front of the elephants.
- Each cue is numbered.
- Milliseconds use a comma.
- No styling, no positioning, no metadata.
- Accepted almost everywhere: YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, LinkedIn, VLC, Premiere, Final Cut, DaVinci Resolve.
WebVTT (.vtt)
WEBVTT
00:00:01.200 --> 00:00:03.360
All right, so here we are, in front of the elephants.
- Starts with the
WEBVTTheader. - Milliseconds use a period.
- Supports styling (
<b>,<i>, classes), positioning and aNOTEblock. - The native format of the HTML5
<track>element, so it is the right choice for subtitles on your own website or web player.
Which one to choose
| Destination | Format |
|---|---|
| YouTube, Vimeo, social networks | SRT (VTT also accepted on YouTube) |
| HTML5 video on your website | VTT |
| Video editors (Premiere, Resolve) | SRT |
| Podcast apps with transcripts | VTT (Apple Podcasts) or SRT |
When in doubt, export both: it costs nothing. Retranscrit generates SRT and VTT from the same transcript with identical timing, so you never have to convert by hand.
Converting between the two
A conversion is just the header and the millisecond separator. If you already have a transcript in Retranscrit, download the other format. If you only have a file, open it in a text editor: add WEBVTT + a blank line at the top and replace , by . in the timecodes to get VTT; do the reverse for SRT.