Video to SRT, without uploading the video
Drop a video in and get a subtitle file out. The speech model runs inside this page on your own machine, so the footage never travels anywhere — which matters more than usual here, because the thing you are subtitling is often the thing that has not been published yet. Free, no account, and no cap on how long the video is.
Or open the full editor to style the captions and burn them into the video.
How to turn a video into an SRT file
The tool above does this on this page — no editor, no account, no upload. What comes out is a standard .srt that any video player, editor or platform will accept.
Add your video to the tool above. Drop in an MP4, MOV, WebM or an audio file. It is read straight from your disk, so a long recording starts as quickly as a short one and there is no cap on the size.
Pick the spoken language. Choose the language actually spoken in the recording. Picking it explicitly is more reliable than auto-detection, and it is what decides which model runs.
Generate the transcript on your own machine. The model downloads once, is cached by the browser, and then transcribes locally — it keeps working with the network disconnected after that first fetch. Nothing about your recording is sent anywhere.
Download the .srt. Press Download .srt. Inside are numbered cues, each with a start and end timestamp and its line of text. The same transcript is also available as .vtt for the web, or .txt for just the words.
What you get
An .srt file with timed lines, ready for YouTube, Premiere, Final Cut, Resolve or a video platform that wants subtitles alongside the file rather than burned into it. The same transcript downloads as .vtt for the web, or as plain text if you only wanted the words.
Timings come from the model at word level and are rounded into caption lines, so they sit where the speech sits rather than being spread evenly across the clip.
SRT or VTT — which one you need
SRT is the older and more widely accepted of the two: YouTube, Vimeo, LinkedIn, every editor. If something asks for "subtitles" and does not say which format, it means SRT.
VTT is the web standard, used by the HTML <track> element and by players built on it. It allows styling and positioning that SRT does not, which almost nobody uses. If you are uploading to a platform, take the SRT; if you are writing the player yourself, take the VTT.
Why in the browser rather than in the cloud
A cloud transcriber has to receive your video before it can start, so you wait for the upload, and your unpublished footage sits on somebody else’s disk for as long as their retention policy says. Here the file is read straight from your drive and the model runs on your processor.
You can check that rather than believing it: open your browser’s network tab while the transcription runs, or turn the internet off once the page has loaded. It carries on working.
Questions
Is there a limit on the video length?
No. Nothing is uploaded, so there is no upload limit and no per-minute cost to pass on. A long recording takes longer to transcribe because your own processor is doing the work, and it runs on a laptop comfortably.
Does it need an account?
No account, no email, no trial. The subtitle file downloads straight to your machine.
Which languages does it handle?
Fifteen, including English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Japanese and Hindi — and Hinglish, which is Hindi speech written in Roman letters the way Indian creators actually type it.
Can I edit the text before downloading?
On this page you get the file as transcribed. To fix words, retime lines or split captions, open the full editor — it runs in the same browser and the video still never leaves your device.
Why is my SRT file not working on YouTube?
Almost always one of three things: the file is not really an .srt (a .txt renamed does not count), the timestamps use a full stop instead of a comma before the milliseconds, or the encoding is not UTF-8 so accented characters break the parse. Files from this page are plain UTF-8 SRT with comma stamps, which is what YouTube expects.
How do I open an SRT file?
Any text editor — Notepad, TextEdit, VS Code. An .srt is plain text: a number, a timestamp line, the caption, a blank line, repeated. That is also why it is safe to fix a typo by hand before uploading it anywhere.
Does YouTube prefer SRT or VTT?
YouTube accepts both and treats them the same. Take the SRT unless something specifically asks for WebVTT — SRT is accepted in more places, and this page gives you both from the same transcription anyway.
Related free tools
Try it on your own video
Nothing to install, no account, and your video never leaves your device. Unlimited free exports, and a one-off payment when you want the watermark gone.
Caption my video — free