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. 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.

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. SRT files are useful when uploading Closed Captions to social media platforms. There’s a specific formatting: the times must appear as HH:MM:SS,MS with an arrow ' –> ' exactly between the start and end time. Time stamps are represented as Hours:Minutes:Seconds, Milliseconds. 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. It’s essentially a text file that contains a numbered list of captions. SRT file (or a subrip file) is a special file type for storing captions and timings.

Download youtube subtitles as text file