Edit SRT and VTT subtitles online

What you can do to a cue

• Change the words. Click in the text box and type. Formatting tags such as <i> are kept as you write them.
• Change the times. Each cue has a start and an end box in the 00:00:01,500 format. A box turns red while what you typed is not a time, and the old value is kept until it is.
• Split at cursor. Put the cursor where the cue should break and press the button. The time is divided in proportion to the text.
• Merge with next. Joins the text of two cues, with a line break between them, and stretches the first to end where the second did.
• Add after, add at the end, delete. New cues start a tenth of a second after the previous one and last two seconds, ready for you to adjust.
• Shift all. Moves every cue by an amount: 2.5, -1 or 1:30.
• Find and replace. Fix a misspelt name everywhere at once. It matches plain text, not patterns, and has options for matching case and whole words only, so replacing ann with Anne need not touch Joanna. The note under the button says how many replacements were made.

Why edit cue by cue

Most fixes to a subtitle file are small and local: a misheard name, a line that stays up a second too long, a cue that should be two. A text box with the whole file in it makes those hard to find and easy to break, because one slip in a timestamp line makes the cue unreadable. Here the timing lines are separate fields that check themselves, and the file is rebuilt from the fields, so the output is always a valid SRT or VTT.

1
00:00:04,000 --> 00:00:09,250
Today we are talking about subtitle files, and why they break so often.

becomes, after Split at cursor placed after "files,":

2
00:00:04,000 --> 00:00:06,613
Today we are talking about subtitle files,

3
00:00:06,613 --> 00:00:09,250
and why they break so often.

What it does for the file as a whole

Cues are renumbered from 1 when you save, so you never maintain the counters by hand. A cue that ends before it starts is left out of the output until you fix it, and the summary above the list tells you how many there are. Cues that overlap are kept and counted, because overlap is legal but often not what you meant. For a larger project, check the finished file with the subtitle checker and join parts with merge subtitles.

Big files

The editor shows forty cues at a time with Previous and Next buttons, so a feature-length file does not become one enormous page. Everything is still edited in the same place and the output box always holds the whole file. If a file needs a systematic change (every cue too long, or everything two seconds late) the line splitter and the time shifter do it in one step instead of cue by cue.

Starting from audio

If there is no subtitle file yet, an editor is the second step. Scriptorium makes the first draft from the recording, with a start and end time for every line, and exports it as SRT or VTT; you can then open that file here to polish it. transcript file formats explained explains what the two formats contain.