VTT to TXT
Or paste subtitle text
What this conversion changes
4 things are dropped or need a decision
- Timing
the whole timeline (the output format records no timings at all)
- Styling
all styling (bold, italic, colour, outline, shadow)
- Line breaks
line breaks (multi-line cues will be joined into one line)
- Format-specific content
content the source format keeps outside its cues (non-cue blocks, header text, per-cue settings, commented-out events) — the target format has no place for it
This list comes from the capability matrix for these two formats, not from the particular file you loaded. A specific file may lose more if it uses features the format allows but the matrix does not model.
This page converts VTT to TXT. Drop a file in — or paste the text — and you get the TXT version back. The conversion runs entirely in your browser, so nothing is uploaded and no account is needed.
These two formats do not store the same things, and the difference is not cosmetic: timing, styling, line breaks and format-specific content have nowhere to go in TXT. The list above comes from what the two formats can each express rather than from your file, so it is the same answer before you load anything.
One file is fine, and so is a whole season: the queue works through them in order and the results come down together as a single ZIP.
Examples
A typical VTT file, converted to TXT
Input
WEBVTT
intro
00:00:01.000 --> 00:00:04.000
Hello there.
00:00:04.500 --> 00:00:08.000 align:start position:10%
Second line with <i>italics</i>.
Output
Hello there.
Second line with italics.
Dropped in this output: timing, styling, line breaks and format-specific content. Everything else matches line for line.
The same conversion on an awkward input
Input
a stray comment line
cue-id-1
00:00:01.000 --> 00:00:02.000
No header, two lines before the timecode.
Output
No header, two lines before the timecode.
This is the kind of damage real files have — mixed line endings, stray whitespace, fields left empty. Compare it with the tidy example above to see what the parser forgives.
Frequently asked questions
Where did the VTT timecodes go?
TXT has none to give: a text export is words, not moments. The order of the VTT lines is kept, so the fortieth line of your file is the fortieth line here, but nothing in the output says when any of it appears on screen.
What happens to bold, italic and colour from VTT to TXT?
TXT stores no styling of any kind, so all of it goes: a `<b>` or `<i>` written into the cue text, or a rule in the file's own `STYLE` block — none of it has anywhere to land, and every line is written as plain text. The words themselves are untouched.
What happens to a two-line VTT cue in TXT?
Both lines are written, one under the other, but the file stops saying they belong together: TXT cannot group lines into one cue, so reading the result back would give two subtitles where your VTT file had one. That matters if a translation pass or a retiming tool is going to read the file afterwards.
What happens to VTT's NOTE, STYLE and REGION blocks in TXT?
They are dropped. A WebVTT file can carry a header, comments, a style block, region definitions and per-cue settings such as `align` or `position`, and TXT has nowhere to put them — it stores cues, not a document. The cues themselves, text and timings, come through whole.
What does the output look like when VTT becomes TXT?
Like TXT: no cue numbers and no timecodes — one line of text per line of subtitle. Every VTT cue becomes one TXT cue, in the same order, with the same text.
Do VTT cues keep their order in the TXT output?
Yes, and they are sorted by start time on the way — earliest first, which is how every format here expects them and how players read them. If your VTT file listed its cues out of sequence, the TXT output puts them back in order; that is a change to the file's structure rather than its content, and it is deliberate.
Can I convert the TXT back to VTT?
Yes, and it has its own list: converting TXT to VTT drops timing. That list is different from the one above because the two formats keep different things.
Does the TXT output keep the VTT file's encoding?
No — the output is UTF-8, with Unix line endings and no byte-order mark, whatever the VTT file used. A file that arrives in UTF-16, or in a Windows single-byte encoding, is decoded on the way in (the result panel says so when that happens); what comes out is always the same UTF-8 TXT.