What Is the SRT Format?

Format

• SRT files consist of four parts, respectively indicating the order of each subtitle in the sequence, the time when the subtitle should appear and disappear, the content of the subtitle and a blank line separating subtitles from each other. Times are displayed in hours, minutes, seconds and milliseconds, with hours, minutes and seconds separated by a colon, and milliseconds separated by a comma. For example, the English subtitles for the beginning of the "Un dì felice" aria from "La Traviata" could look like this:
  
  1
  00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:16,000
  One day you appeared
  in front of me, happy, ethereal,
  
  2
  00:00:17,200 --> 00:00:33,310
  And since that day, I have lived
  trembling from unknown love.
  
  

Compatibility

• Many freeware video players, such as VLC, MPlayer and Media Player Classic Home Cinema, are able to read subtitles in the SRT format and dynamically add them to movies. Other players, such as QuickTime, Winamp and Windows Media Player, are able to read subtitles in the SRT format only after the installation of an external plug-in such as DirectVobSub or ffdshow. Additionally, when you upload a video to YouTube, you can also upload a subtitle file in SRT format; users who watch your video will then be able to view the subtitles using the Closed Captioning button in the YouTube video player.
  
  

Benefits

• Creating a separate SRT file for subtitles rather than embedding them directly into a video file has several benefits. Viewers who don't need subtitles can simply switch them off to enjoy the video without them rather than be forced to endure them anyway. If you want to translate the subtitles into a different language to allow more people to watch and understand the movie, you can simply create a new SRT file rather than have to create a separate video file for each translation.
  
  

Creating SRT Files

• You can create SRT files either manually, using any text editor with the ability to save plain text files, or automatically, using a program such as SubRip or D-Subtitler. These programs can be used to open any video file with embedded subtitles; you can then configure them to automatically detect the subtitles and turn them into an SRT file using optical character recognition.