Short, concrete guides to subtitle files — the formats, the timings, and why the last one you made would not load.
Strip the numbers and timestamps out of a subtitle file and keep the words. What a clean extraction has to handle, and why find-and-replace falls short.
42 characters a line, two lines, about 17 characters a second. Where those subtitle numbers come from, what they are protecting, and when to break them.
Subtitles that will not show up usually fail for one of six reasons. Here they are in the order worth checking, from the filename to the file's own encoding.
You have the words but no timings. Here is how a transcript becomes a subtitle file: where to break each caption, how long to hold it, and what to strip first.
Subtitles that are late by a fixed amount need a shift. Subtitles that drift further out as the video runs need a framerate correction. Here is how to tell.
SRT and WebVTT hold the same subtitles and differ over a comma. Here is what actually changes, when each one is required, and how to convert either way.