YouTube caption converter
YouTube Studio can give you captions as an .sbv file, a SubViewer format that many editors and players do not open. Paste the SBV text or open the file, and this converter rewrites every cue as numbered SRT with the same timings and line breaks. It runs in your browser, is free and needs no account.
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Three steps
Paste the SBV text or open the .sbv file you downloaded.
Each timing line and its text become a numbered SRT cue.
Check the preview, then download captions.srt.
Useful for
What it checks
The SBV format
SBV and SRT carry the same information: when a caption starts, when it ends and what it says. Only the layout differs.
Each cue starts with one timing line: the start time, a comma, then the end time, for example 0:00:01.000,0:00:04.200. Hours use a single digit and a full stop sits before the milliseconds. The caption text follows on one or more lines, and a blank line ends the cue. There are no cue numbers. YouTube's help page lists SubViewer (.sbv or .sub) among its basic caption formats and says the file must be plain UTF-8.
SRT numbers every cue, writes two-digit hours, uses a comma before the milliseconds and puts an arrow between the two times: 00:00:01,000 --> 00:00:04,200. The converter adds the numbers and rewrites the times; the text and the line breaks inside each cue stay as they were. Some SBV files mark a line break with [br]; the converter turns that into a real line break.
YouTube says it recognises no styling markup in SBV files, so there are no fonts, colours or positions to lose. Every cue with a readable timing line and some text comes through. Cues with a broken timing line, or with no text under it, are skipped, so compare the cue count in the preview with what you expect before you download.
If the track was created by YouTube's automatic captions, the SRT copies its words exactly, mistakes included. Read it through for names, numbers and punctuation before you publish it elsewhere. If accented letters or non-Latin script look garbled after opening the file, the encoding is the likely cause; run it through the subtitle file encoding checker first.
Questions
SBV is the SubViewer caption format. YouTube lists it as one of the basic caption formats it accepts. Each cue is a timing line such as 0:00:01.000,0:00:04.200 followed by the caption text, with a blank line between cues.
No styling is lost because SBV holds none. Start and end times, text and line breaks carry over. Only cues the converter cannot read, such as a timing line with a typo, are skipped.
No. The conversion runs in your browser, so the file is not sent to CapsAI or anyone else. The tool is free and needs no account.
This tool only goes from SBV to SRT. You rarely need the reverse: YouTube's help page lists SubRip (.srt) as a supported upload format, so you can upload the SRT directly.
A cue is skipped when its timing line is not in the H:MM:SS.mmm,H:MM:SS.mmm shape or when there is no text under it. Fix the line in the input and convert again.
No. CapsAI's captioning burns captions into the MP4 it exports and does not produce subtitle files. This converter is a separate free tool for a file you already have.
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