VTT to TXT
Meeting recordings and web videos often hand you captions as a .vtt file, full of timing lines and layout settings. Convert it to TXT to get a transcript you can read, search and paste into minutes or notes.
Subtitle Converter
or drop SRT, VTT, ASS … files here ·
Max 95 MB per file· Up to 20 files· Deleted after 30 minutes
Files are processed on our servers and deleted after 30 minutes.
Moves every subtitle by this many seconds. Use a positive number if subtitles appear too early, negative if too late (e.g. -1.5).
Set this and the target rate when subtitles drift further out of sync over the film, a sign they were timed for a different video release.
Frame rate of the video you will play the subtitles with. A 23.976 → 25 conversion fixes most PAL/NTSC drift.
Only used for plain TXT input, which has no times: each line is shown for this long, one after another. Adjust times afterwards in a subtitle editor if needed.
Auto-detect handles most files. Pick the encoding manually if accented, Cyrillic or Arabic letters come out as question marks. The output is always UTF-8.
Font used by the default ASS style. The viewer's computer must have it installed; Arial is the safest choice.
Size relative to a 1080-pixel-tall video. 48 is a typical size for films.
How to use this tool
- 1
Upload the .vtt file
Use a transcript downloaded from a meeting recording, captions saved from a course platform or any WebVTT file, up to 20 files and 95 MB each.
- 2
Choose timestamps or not
Include timestamps is on, so each line starts with a time such as [00:12:40], handy for meeting minutes. Turn it off for clean prose, and turn on Join lines into paragraphs to merge short caption lines.
- 3
Convert to TXT
Press Convert to Plain text (TXT) and download the UTF-8 text file. The VTT and the TXT are deleted from the server after 30 minutes.
How a WebVTT file differs from plain text
WebVTT, the Web Video Text Tracks format, is the caption format of HTML5 video. It started in 2010 as a web-friendly rework of SRT and is maintained by the W3C. A valid file must start with the word WEBVTT; timestamps use a period before the milliseconds, as in 00:12:40.250, and the hours may be left out entirely.
Around that core, WebVTT allows a lot of extra structure. A cue can have an identifier line, settings after the timing that place it on screen, NOTE blocks for comments, STYLE blocks with CSS, voice tags that name the speaker and class tags for color. All of that is useful to a browser and noise in a transcript. Meeting platforms rely on it heavily: Zoom and Microsoft Teams both offer their transcripts as .vtt downloads.
If your captions came as SRT instead, SRT to TXT does the same job with clean paragraphs as its default. For a recording with no captions at all, MP3 to text transcribes the audio track itself.
WEBVTT NOTE Exported from a lecture recording intro-1 00:00:04.120 --> 00:00:07.900 align:start line:85% Welcome back. Today we start with <i>supply and demand</i>. 00:00:08.300 --> 00:00:11.000 Open your notes at page 12.
Caption formats that convert to a text transcript
| from ↓ · to → | TXT | TXT with times |
|---|---|---|
| VTT | VTT to TXT: yes | VTT to TXT with times: yes |
| SRT | SRT to TXT: yes | SRT to TXT with times: yes |
| SBV | SBV to TXT: yes | SBV to TXT with times: yes |
| ASS | ASS to TXT: yes | ASS to TXT with times: yes |
| TTML | TTML to TXT: yes | TTML to TXT with times: yes |
VTT
WebVTT subtitles
VTT is the Web Video Text Tracks format, developed by WHATWG and the W3C around 2010 for HTML5 video. It looks similar to SRT but adds a WEBVTT header and supports positioning, styling, speaker labels and metadata. Browsers use it for captions through the <track> element, and streaming platforms and YouTube accept it. Some desktop players and editors expect SRT instead.
- Compression
- –
- Transparency
- –
- Animation
- –
- Introduced
- 2010 · W3C / WHATWG
TXT
Plain text
A TXT file contains only plain characters with no formatting, fonts, images or layout. Modern text files are usually encoded in UTF-8, which covers every language, though older files may use other encodings and show garbled characters. Plain text is tiny, never becomes obsolete and opens on every device, from phones to servers. It cannot hold bold text, tables or pictures, so structure must be expressed with spacing or simple markup.
- Compression
- –
- Transparency
- –
- Animation
- –
- Introduced
- –
WebVTT adds a header, cue settings and comment blocks around the captions; converting to TXT strips all of it so a meeting or lecture transcript reads like a document.
Cleaning up a VTT transcript for minutes or notes
- Read the first screen of the TXT to confirm speaker names appear the way you expect
- Search for doubled lines if the captions were automatic and rolled up on screen
- Turn on Remove formatting tags so italics and color markup do not appear as raw tags
- Keep Include timestamps on for minutes, so anyone can jump to a moment in the recording
- Pick an Input encoding manually only when accented letters come out as symbols
- Store the original .vtt with the video in case you need timed captions later
VTT to TXT questions
Where do I find the VTT transcript of a Zoom meeting?
When audio transcription is enabled for cloud recordings, Zoom stores the transcript as a .vtt file next to the video in the recording list, and it can be downloaded from there. Each cue carries the speaker's display name in front of the words, so names survive the conversion as plain text.
Does a Microsoft Teams transcript work?
Yes. Teams lets meeting organizers download a transcript as .vtt. Speaker names are written as WebVTT voice tags rather than ordinary text, so read the first few lines of the TXT to confirm the names came out the way you want before you share it.
What happens to the WEBVTT header and NOTE comments?
They are file metadata, not dialogue, so they are left out. Cue settings such as align:start or line:85% after the timing are dropped too, because plain text has no screen position.
The captions repeat every line twice. Why?
Automatic captions from some platforms are written in a roll-up style, where each cue repeats the previous line while the next one appears. The converter writes what the cues contain, so delete the duplicates in your editor or start from a manually edited caption track.
Should I convert to SRT instead?
Only if the result still has to play with a video. A player or editor that refuses .vtt usually takes SRT, which VTT to SRT produces with the timings intact.
