SRT to TXT Converter

Free online SRT to TXT converter that strips cue numbers, timecodes and markup from .srt and .vtt subtitles and returns clean text, all inside your browser.

Drop an .srt or .vtt here or click to choose

Join sentences split across cues into paragraphs

Drop repeated lines (rolling auto-captions)

Keep a start-time column instead of paragraphs

Converting…

Get the transcript from YouTube itself

YouTube Video to Text Converter is a free Chrome extension: open any video and it pulls the transcript right on the page - as clean text or as subtitles.

Transcript of any YouTube video in one click
Clean text without timecodes - or .srt with them
Copy to clipboard or save as a file
Works with subtitles in other languages

YouTube Video to Text Converter
Free Chrome extension

Install from Google Chrome Web Store

Get YouTube Video to Text Converter

Free Chrome extension - no account, no upload.

How to convert an SRT to TXT file

Add your subtitle file
Drag an .srt or .vtt onto the tool at the top of this page, or click the field and pick the file from disk. The name and the number of cues appear at once, so you can check that you took the right subtitle track and not the forced-subs one.
Pick what to keep
Every block in an .srt has a cue number, a timing line such as 00:00:04,000 --> 00:00:06,500, and the words that appear on screen. By default the converter keeps the words and throws the rest away, formatting tags included. If you need the timing later, flip the timecode switch before you run the conversion.
Look through the preview
The preview shows the finished text before you save it. Repeated cues and empty frames are already gone at this point, so what you scroll through is close to the final file. YouTube auto-captions are the hard case. They roll on screen word by word, which means each new cue repeats most of the cue before it. The converter compares neighboring cues and keeps only the longest version, and that is what turns the stutter back into normal sentences. Subtitle tracks also open or close with a translator credit or an advertising line, and that is the piece worth deleting by hand.
Save the TXT
Click download and the result is written to a .txt in UTF-8. The output keeps the name of the subtitle file, which matters when you save a whole season one episode after another.

Why convert SRT to TXT here?

Turning subtitles to text by hand means opening the .srt in Notepad and deleting numbers and timestamps block by block; on a 90-minute film that is well over a thousand blocks and most of an evening. That manual pass is what this page removes.

A transcript, not a stripped subtitle file

Deleting timecodes is only half the job. A subtitle track is written for the screen, not for reading. The same caption comes twice when it spans two frames, formatting tags sit inside the speech, and empty cues are scattered through the file. A subtitle to text converter has to handle all of that in one pass, and this one does.

The .txt holds the spoken lines and nothing else.
Sentences broken across frames are joined into continuous text.
Empty cues, duplicated lines and markup tags are dropped.
The file stays in your browser and is never uploaded to a server.

Add to Chrome

SRT and VTT in, TXT out

The tool reads SubRip (.srt) and WebVTT (.vtt), including the WEBVTT header and the cue settings that VTT adds after the timing line. Every SRT to TXT file it writes is plain UTF-8, so accented letters and Cyrillic open correctly in Notepad, Word or any editor.

SRT to text in readable paragraphs

Captions are wrapped at around 42 characters per line, so one sentence can be spread over three cues. The converter merges them by punctuation instead of by line break, and you get readable paragraphs rather than a narrow column of fragments.

Markup stripped from the speech

Formatting left by subtitle editors goes away with the timing. The converter drops <i>, <b> and <font color> tags together with position codes like {\an8}. What you get is the text of the track with no markup and no timing left in it. Sound labels such as [Music] and speaker names are part of that text, so they stay, and you delete them only if you do not need them.

Timecodes on request

Clean text is the default, but sometimes you need the timing anyway - to quote a video at a given second, or to find the moment in the source again. Turn the option on and every line keeps its start time in a separate column, which pastes straight into a spreadsheet.

Who converts subtitles to text?

Students and researchers

A captioned lecture becomes a transcript you can search, quote in a paper, or paste into notes without retyping from the video. If you also write notes by voice, our roundup of Windows speech-to-text tools covers that side of the job.

Editors and subtitlers

Proofreading is faster in flat text. With the numbering gone, a typo or a cue that was left untranslated stands out at a glance.

Content and SEO teams

A published video turns into an article draft, show notes or a description. If the video is on YouTube, our free Chrome extension for YouTube transcripts takes the text right on the watch page, so you do not even have to download the subtitle file first.

🙋 Frequently Asked Questions

❓ Can you convert SRT to TXT?

Yes, and it takes one file drop. An .srt is already plain text inside, so nothing is re-encoded along the way. What makes the file hard to read is the numbering and the timing wrapped around the speech. The tool at the top of this page strips both and saves what is left as a .txt, and that is the whole SRT to TXT file conversion.

❓ What is SRT vs TXT?

An SRT (SubRip) file is timed. Each block holds a sequence number, a start and end time in the form 00:01:12,340 --> 00:01:14,900, and one or two lines of text. A TXT file has no structure at all, just characters. So SRT tells a player when to show a line, while TXT only tells you what was said.

❓ Can I change TXT to SRT?

Yes, and you do not need a subtitle editor for it. Our TXT to SRT converter splits a text file into cues and lays even timecodes over them, which is enough for a slideshow, a voice-over draft or a track you plan to retime later. It cannot know the real timing of a recording, so for a finished film you still shift the cue points to the speech afterwards.

❓ How to read SRT files as text?

Any text editor opens an .srt, from Notepad and WordPad to VS Code, because it is a text file with an unusual extension. Reading it that way is tiring though. Every second or third line is a number or a timestamp, and sentences stop in the middle. An SRT to text pass here gives you the same content in one readable flow, and if you only want to look inside a file without changing it, open it in our online SRT viewer.

❓ How do I extract text from SRT subtitles?

Drop the file into the converter above to extract text from SRT or VTT captions, then download the .txt. There is no install, no sign-up and no size limit. The work is done by your own CPU in the browser tab, so an SRT to TXT file for a three-hour film goes through as fast as your machine allows and never waits in a queue. One file at a time - the page can convert SRT to TXT only in single runs, and there is no batch mode.

❓ Auto-generated captions are sloppy. Will the converter fix the wording?

No. The tool cleans structure, not language. Automatic captions do come with punctuation these days, but it lands unevenly, and proper names and technical terms are often misheard, which no converter can guess back. You either edit those places yourself or run the text through a language model afterwards. When the wording matters and the recording is still on your disk, a second transcription pass is usually better than repairing captions: our Windows program for transcribing audio and video does it on your own PC.