SRT ↔ WebVTT, with the differences visible.

The common ground

Both formats connect text with start and end times. For plain dialogue captions, conversion is usually straightforward. Arbray reads the file, lets you review its cues and writes the selected format. It does not just rename the extension.

SRT output uses numbered cues and comma-separated milliseconds. WebVTT output begins with WEBVTT and uses a dot before milliseconds. The extension alone is not reliable: a file named .srt may contain WebVTT data, so the workbench checks the content.

SRT
1
00:00:01,000 --> 00:00:03,500
A quiet morning.

WebVTT
WEBVTT

00:00:01.000 --> 00:00:03.500
A quiet morning.

Presentation does not always travel

WebVTT can contain cue identifiers, positioning settings, notes, regions and style blocks. Arbray retains these supported blocks when exporting WebVTT; metadata blocks are placed before the cues. It is a text preparation tool, not a full WebVTT rendering engine.

When converting WebVTT to SRT, Arbray asks you to acknowledge the loss of metadata, identifiers, settings and markup. Dialogue text and timing are retained; plain-text conversion removes markup. If placement or speaker styling is essential, keep WebVTT and test in the destination player.

SRT formatting conventions differ between players. When exporting to WebVTT, basic b/i/u tags are preserved; other angle-bracket sequences are escaped and displayed as literal text. When moving tagged SRT to WebVTT, inspect the result in the target player rather than assuming identical appearance. The tool preserves the text but does not translate every vendor-specific styling convention.

Batch conversion without mixing files

Open up to ten files. Review and edit each file separately, then choose the output format and download a ZIP. A blocking error in any file stops the whole batch, so the archive does not quietly omit an unreadable file. Filenames receive a numeric prefix in the archive to keep equally named inputs separate.

For a transcript without timestamps, select TXT. The exported text follows cue order and retains line breaks within captions. It is not an edited prose transcript: repeated captions and speaker labels may still need attention.

Check the actual destination

Reopen the converted file and compare cue count, first and last times, and a few formatted captions. Then test the player that will display it. The WebVTT specification is a useful reference for supported syntax; a clean review in Arbray is not a promise that every player implements the same features.

WebVTT specification, W3C ↗