or
-2.5)
Drop .sbv files or paste SBV text to start.
From YouTube Studio to a working SRT
- Export the captions — in YouTube Studio, open Subtitles, choose the video and language, then use the three-dot menu on the track to download the
.sbvfile. - Drop it above — the format is detected as SBV automatically and the output is already set to SRT. Multiple exports convert in one go.
- Download the .srt — cues arrive numbered, with
-->timing lines and comma milliseconds, ready for your editor, player or translation platform.
How SBV differs from SRT
0:00:01.600,0:00:04.080 >> Hello everyone, welcome back.
1 00:00:01,600 --> 00:00:04,080 >> Hello everyone, welcome back.
Four small structural differences make SBV unreadable to most SRT importers, and this converter rewrites every one of them:
- One comma-joined timing line — SBV writes
start,endon a single line; SRT expectsstart --> endwith a spaced arrow. - Millisecond separator — SBV uses a period inside each timestamp; SRT uses a comma (confusingly, the opposite role the comma plays in SBV's line).
- Single-digit hours — SBV writes
0:00:01.600; SRT convention is a zero-padded00:00:01,600. - No cue numbers — SBV blocks start directly with the timing line; SRT requires a sequence number above each cue, which the converter generates from 1.
SBV carries no styling whatsoever — no italics, no colors, no positioning — so nothing is lost going to SRT. Speaker markers like >> are plain text and pass through untouched.
Typical SBV headaches
- Excel or a CSV tool mangled the file. Because every timing line contains a comma, spreadsheet apps happily "import" .sbv as CSV and destroy it on save. Always open SBV files in a plain-text editor — or convert them here straight from the original download.
- Renaming .sbv to .srt does nothing. Players then read
0:00:01.600,0:00:04.080where they expect a numbered cue with an arrow, and show either nothing or an import error. The structure has to be rewritten, not relabeled. - Blocks glued together without a blank line. Hand-edited SBV sometimes loses the empty line between cues; the following cue's timing line then gets swallowed as caption text. This converter skips unreadable blocks instead of failing and reports how many were skipped, so you can fix the source precisely.
SBV to SRT — frequently asked questions
Where do I get an SBV file from YouTube?
In YouTube Studio open Subtitles, pick the video and language, click the three-dot menu next to the track and choose a download format — .sbv is the classic SubViewer export. Modern Studio can also hand you .srt or .vtt directly, so this converter is most useful for older .sbv archives you already have, or for third-party captioning tools that still only emit SBV.
Why won't my video editor open the .sbv file directly?
Almost nothing outside YouTube speaks SubViewer. An SBV timing line reads 0:00:01.600,0:00:04.080 — no --> arrow, no cue numbers, single-digit hours — so importers built for SRT see a malformed file and give up on the first line. Converting to SRT rewrites the structure into what editors, players and translation platforms expect.
Does SBV support italics, colors or positioning?
No — SBV cue text is plain text only. That means there is nothing to lose in this direction of conversion. If you want italics in the resulting SRT you can add <i> tags after converting; just don't take that SRT back to SBV afterwards, because YouTube would display the tags as literal text.
What do the ">>" arrows in my YouTube captions mean?
A double angle bracket is the closed-captioning convention for a change of speaker (and >> [music]-style brackets mark sound events). They are ordinary text, not markup, so the converter passes them through unchanged. Keep them if the SRT is for accessibility; delete them in your editor if the SRT is just a transcript source.
Can I convert SRT back to SBV for tools that expect SubViewer?
Yes. Change the "Convert to" menu on this page to SBV (.sbv) and drop in an SRT file — the converter writes proper SubViewer output with period milliseconds, single-digit hours and comma-joined timing lines. Enable tag stripping first so no <i> or <font> markup leaks into the plain-text SBV.