What Is an SRT File
A plain text list of lines and the times they appear. Opens in any editor, and breaks on one character.
Checked August 6, 2026
The short answer
An SRT file is a text file of subtitles. Each entry is a number, a line saying when the subtitle appears and disappears, the text itself, then a blank line. It holds no video and no audio. It sits beside the video file rather than inside it, and you can open it in any text editor. The name is short for SubRip, the program that first wrote them.
What one entry looks like
| Line | What it holds | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| First | A number | Counting from 1, in order. Most players tolerate gaps in the numbering, and nothing is gained by having any. |
| Second | 00:00:04,120 --> 00:00:06,900 | Start time, an arrow, end time. Hours, minutes, seconds, then a comma and the milliseconds. |
| Third onward | The subtitle text | One line or two. Three is more than fits comfortably across a phone. |
| Last | A blank line | This is what ends the entry. Leave it out and the next entry gets swallowed into this one. |
| Encoding | UTF-8 | Anything else and accented or non Latin characters arrive as rubbish. |
| Extension | .srt | Renaming a .txt to .srt is a real fix when the text inside is already correct. |
That is the entire format. There is no styling in it, no positioning and no colour, which is why almost everything can read it and why wanting any of those puts you in a different format.
The comma is not a typo
The milliseconds are separated by a comma, not a full stop. 00:00:04,120 is valid and 00:00:04.120 is not. This is the most common way a hand edited subtitle file stops loading, and it fails quietly: the player does not tell you which line it choked on, it shows no subtitles at all.
The arrow is the other half of the same problem. It is two hyphens and a greater than sign, with a space on each side. An editor that helpfully turns two hyphens into a single long dash breaks the file just as completely, and that one is much harder to spot by eye.
It sits beside the video, not inside it
A subtitle file is a separate file. Making one changes nothing about the video, and uploading one changes nothing about the video either. Players pair them by name: put movie.mp4 and movie.srt in the same folder and most of them work it out without being told.
Burned in subtitles are the other approach, where the words become part of the picture itself. Those cannot be switched off, cannot be swapped for another language and cannot be read by a search engine. A separate file can be all three, which is why every platform that cares about reach asks for one.
How to open one
Any text editor opens it, because it is text. Notepad, TextEdit, anything at all. That is also how you fix a single line that comes up a second early, if it really is only one line.
To watch it with the video, put both files in the same folder under the same name and open the video in a player like VLC, or drag the .srt onto the window while it is playing. On YouTube it goes into the subtitles panel of a video you have already uploaded. On most social platforms it goes in at upload time.
Where the file comes from
You can type one, and for anything longer than about a minute you will not want to. The usual route is to have the speech transcribed with the timings already attached, then correct the handful of words the machine got wrong.
The transcriber here does that from a video and hands back .srt, along with .vtt and plain text. Only the sound is sent for transcription. The video itself stays on your machine, which for anything unreleased is the part that matters.
More guides
GuidesFAQ
- What does SRT stand for?
- SubRip Subtitle. SubRip was a program for pulling subtitles off DVDs, and the format it wrote outlived it by a very long way.
- Can I open an SRT file in Notepad?
- Yes. It is plain text, so any editor opens it and any editor can save it back. Save it as UTF-8 if it contains accented or non Latin characters.
- Why are my subtitles not showing?
- Usually one of three things: the milliseconds are separated by a full stop instead of a comma, a blank line between two entries is missing, or the file was saved in an encoding other than UTF-8. All three fail without an error message.
- Do SRT files support bold and italics?
- Not officially. The format carries no styling at all. Some players honour simple HTML style tags inside the text and you cannot count on it, so anything that has to look a particular way belongs in a different format.
- How do I get an SRT file from a video?
- Have the speech transcribed with timings, then export it. The video transcriber here returns .srt, .vtt and plain text, and sends only the audio track to do it.
- Is an SRT file the same as closed captions?
- Close, but not the same thing. Captions also describe sound that is not speech, a door closing or music starting, because they are written for someone who cannot hear the audio at all. An SRT file can hold either. What goes in it is up to whoever wrote it.
Get an SRT from a video
Any length, no account. Only the sound is sent, and the video stays on your machine.
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