TidyTranscribe

How to Make an SRT Subtitle File (Free, From Any Video)

Updated

An SRT file is the most widely supported subtitle format: YouTube, Vimeo, Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, DaVinci Resolve, CapCut and players like VLC all accept it. You can write one by hand in any text editor, but the fastest way is to generate it automatically from your video and then fix the few mistakes.

What an SRT file looks like

An SRT file is plain text made of numbered blocks:

1
00:00:01,000 --> 00:00:04,200
Welcome to the channel.

2
00:00:04,200 --> 00:00:07,900
Today we're looking at three simple ways to start.

Each block has:

  1. A sequence number, starting at 1.
  2. A start and end time in hours:minutes:seconds,milliseconds — note the comma before the milliseconds.
  3. One or two lines of subtitle text.
  4. A blank line before the next block.

Generate an SRT file automatically

  1. Open Video to text & subtitles.
  2. Choose the spoken language and a model (Balanced is a good default).
  3. Drop in your MP4 or WEBM video. The audio is extracted and transcribed in your browser — the video is not uploaded.
  4. When it finishes, click Download SRT.

If your video is in a format your browser cannot open (for example some MOV or MKV files), export just the audio as MP3 or M4A from your editor and use that instead. The timestamps will still match the video.

Fix and polish the subtitles

Open the .srt file in any plain-text editor (TextEdit in plain-text mode, Notepad, VS Code) and:

  • Correct names, brand names and technical terms.
  • Split very long lines — about 42 characters per line and at most two lines per block is a common guideline.
  • Keep the timestamps and numbering as they are unless a subtitle is clearly in the wrong place.
  • Save the file with UTF-8 encoding so accented and non-Latin characters display correctly.

Add the SRT file to your video

YouTube

In YouTube Studio, open the video, go to Subtitles, choose the language, then Upload file → With timing and select your SRT.

Video editors

Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve and Final Cut Pro can import SRT as a caption track that you can style or burn into the video. CapCut can import subtitle files on desktop.

Video players

Give the SRT the same file name as the video (for example trip.mp4 and trip.srt) and keep them in the same folder. VLC and most players load it automatically.

Common problems

  • Subtitles don’t appear: check the file really ends in .srt and not .srt.txt.
  • Strange characters: re-save the file as UTF-8.
  • Upload rejected: make sure timestamps use a comma (00:00:01,000), not a period.
  • Subtitles out of sync: if you trimmed the start of the video after transcribing, transcribe the final export again.

More guides