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SRT to TXT Converter

Extract a clean, paste-ready transcript from any .srt subtitle file. Indices, timing lines, and inline formatting tags are stripped — just the spoken text, one paragraph per cue.

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Why extract text from an SRT?

An .srt file is built for video players — it’s a stream of timed cues, each prefixed with an index and a start/end timestamp. Useful when a media player is reading it, painful when a human is. If your end use is anything except playing the subtitles on top of video, the timing scaffolding is just noise.

Common reasons to pull the bare transcript out:

  • Publishing podcast show notes or a blog post built around an interview’s key quotes.
  • Building a searchable text archive of long-form video content so editors can grep across episodes.
  • Sending the transcript to a translator, copy editor, or legal reviewer who shouldn’t have to wade through timecodes.
  • Feeding the transcript into another tool (a summarizer, LLM, accessibility document) that wants plain text input.

Side-by-side example

The same two cues, before and after stripping:

Source — interview.srt
1
00:00:01,000 --> 00:00:04,000
Welcome to the show.
<i>Let's get into it.</i>

2
00:00:05,500 --> 00:00:08,250
My guest today is
Alice Chen.
Output — interview.txt
Welcome to the show. Let's get into it.

My guest today is Alice Chen.

Multi-line cues collapse into single paragraphs (a space joins the broken lines), HTML-style tags like <i> are stripped, and cues are separated by blank lines so the text remains readable as prose.

How to convert SRT to plain text

  1. Drop your .srt file onto the drop zone above (or click to open the file picker).
  2. The converter parses every cue, strips indices and timing lines, removes inline formatting tags, and joins multi-line cues into single paragraphs.
  3. Click Download to save the result as a .txt file, ready to paste into your CMS, document, or AI prompt.

What does NOT survive

This is a deliberately lossy conversion. The following SRT content is removed from the output:

  • Cue index numbers (the 1, 2, etc. at the start of each block).
  • Timing lines (the --> separators).
  • Inline formatting tags: <i>, <b>, <u>, <font>.
  • Inline newlines within a cue — collapsed to single spaces so each cue reads as one paragraph rather than poetry.

If you need to preserve any of these, this isn’t the right tool — keep the file as .srt or pick a different destination format from our other converters.

Frequently asked questions

No — the point of this converter is to extract just the spoken words for use cases where timing doesn't matter (blog posts, transcripts, show notes, search). If you need timed cues, keep the file as .srt or convert to .vtt for browser use.

Working in After Effects?

Subflow does something different from this converter — it generates captions inside After Effects as native AE text layers, in 51 languages. This tool is for when you already have a .srt file from somewhere else and just need the spoken text out of it.

See Subflow