Your subtitles are a transcript you already paid for
Every SRT or VTT file is a time-coded transcript — often human-checked and more accurate than a fresh auto-transcription. Stripping the timing markup gives you clean text for a dozen jobs: turning a video into a blog post, pulling quotes for social media, feeding an AI summarizer, translating a program, or archiving searchable text of your footage.
What the converter does
- Removes cue numbers,
00:00:01,000 --> 00:00:03,500timing lines, and the WEBVTT header - Strips styling tags (
<i>,<b>,<font>) while keeping the words - Optionally merges cue fragments into readable paragraphs — subtitle line breaks fall mid-sentence by design, so merging usually reads far better
- Optionally keeps a clean
[hh:mm:ss]start time per cue — handy for YouTube chapter notes and quote references
Need to fix the timing rather than remove it? That's the job of our subtitle sync fixer & converter. Curious about the formats themselves? See SRT vs VTT explained.
FAQ
How do I convert an SRT file to plain text?
Drop the .srt file into the tool above (or paste its contents). Timestamps and cue numbers are stripped instantly, leaving only the spoken text. Copy the result or download it as a .txt file. VTT files work exactly the same way.
Can I keep the timestamps in a readable form?
Yes — enable "Keep [hh:mm:ss] timestamps" and each line is prefixed with its start time in a clean readable format, useful for show notes, YouTube descriptions or referencing quotes back to the video.
Does this remove formatting tags like <i> and speaker names?
Italic/bold tags (<i>, <b>, <font>) are removed automatically. Speaker labels written as "NAME:" at the start of a line are kept by default since they are often meaningful — delete them in the output if you don’t need them.
Is my subtitle file uploaded to a server?
No. The conversion runs entirely in your browser with JavaScript. Your file never leaves your device — this page even works offline once loaded.
Why convert subtitles to a transcript at all?
A subtitle file is often the cheapest accurate transcript you already own: repurpose it as a blog post draft, quote source, translation source, meeting notes, or paste it into an AI tool for summarization — subtitle timing markup just gets in the way for all of those.