Make SRT File

A .SRT file (or a subrip file) is a special file type for storing captions and timings. It’s essentially a text file that contains a numbered list of captions. Each section of the .SRT file contains a number, start time, end time, the caption text, and a new line to signify when the text should appear as an overlay on the video. Time stamps are represented as Hours:Minutes:Seconds, Milliseconds. There’s a specific formatting: the times must appear as HH:MM:SS,MS with an arrow " –> " exactly between the start and end time.

SRT files are useful when uploading Closed Captions to social media platforms. Video sites like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube and hosting platforms like Wistia and Vimeo rely on SRT files to show dynamic subtitles to the viewer. These captions will only appear when the user clicks the “CC” button in the viewer — if you want the text to appear for every viewer, you have to add Open Captions instead. Most hosting platforms have a space to upload an SRT file before you publish, then display the subtitles within the native video viewer depending on the user’s settings.

Subtitles make videos on social media more engaging for people with the sound off and more accessible to people with hearing disabilities. If you have multiple audiences who speak different languages, you might want to upload an SRT to the platform instead of burning the text directly into the video so that different languages appear for different viewers.

Use Kapwing’s SRT file editor to avoid this finicky formatting and reduce the high cost of ordering caption files for every video you make. Kapwing’s platform allows you to generate or type out subtitles, time them out against the video, and then download a new updated SRT file. This editor makes it much easier to listen to the video and create an SRT file to match the audio track or automatically extract the subtitles from the video’s audio track.

If you have a Kapwing Pro Workspace, you can now download your subtitles as an SRT file. Just open the subtitle maker, generate or type out the text, adjust the timings, and click the “Download SRT” button in the left column.

If you want to get the SRT file for videos that you’ve already created, just click “Edit” to go back to the subtitle editor and download the SRT file retroactively. We hope that this new functionality makes it easier for Kapwing Pro customers to produce captioned social media videos at scale.