ASS to SBV
Or paste subtitle text
What this conversion changes
4 things are dropped or need a decision
- Styling
all styling (bold, italic, colour, outline, shadow)
- Positioning
on-screen positioning (every cue returns to the default position)
- Karaoke
karaoke timing (per-syllable highlighting)
- Format-specific content
content the source format keeps outside its cues (non-cue blocks, header text, per-cue settings, commented-out events) — the target format has no place for it
This list comes from the capability matrix for these two formats, not from the particular file you loaded. A specific file may lose more if it uses features the format allows but the matrix does not model.
This page converts ASS to SBV. Drop a file in — or paste the text — and you get the SBV version back. The conversion runs entirely in your browser, so nothing is uploaded and no account is needed.
These two formats do not store the same things, and the difference is not cosmetic: styling, positioning, karaoke and format-specific content have nowhere to go in SBV. The list above comes from what the two formats can each express rather than from your file, so it is the same answer before you load anything.
One file is fine, and so is a whole season: the queue works through them in order and the results come down together as a single ZIP.
Examples
A typical ASS file, converted to SBV
Input
[Script Info]
Title: Example
ScriptType: v4.00+
WrapStyle: 0
[V4+ Styles]
Format: Name, Fontname, Fontsize, PrimaryColour, SecondaryColour, OutlineColour, BackColour, Bold, Italic, Underline, StrikeOut, ScaleX, ScaleY, Spacing, Angle, BorderStyle, Outline, Shadow, Alignment, MarginL, MarginR, MarginV, Encoding
Style: Default,Arial,20,&H00FFFFFF,&H000000FF,&H00000000,&H00000000,0,0,0,0,100,100,0,0,1,2,2,2,10,10,10,1
Style: Title,Arial,36,&H0000FFFF,&H000000FF,&H00000000,&H00000000,-1,0,0,0,100,100,0,0,1,2,2,2,10,10,10,1
[Events]
Format: Layer, Start, End, Style, Name, MarginL, MarginR, MarginV, Effect, Text
Dialogue: 0,0:00:01.00,0:00:04.00,Default,,0,0,0,,Hello there.
Dialogue: 0,0:00:05.00,0:00:08.50,Default,,0,0,0,,{\i1}Italic{\i0} and {\b1}bold{\b0} text.
Dialogue: 0,0:00:09.00,0:00:12.00,Title,,0,0,0,,{\pos(320,240)}Positioned
Dialogue: 0,0:00:13.00,0:00:16.00,Default,,0,0,0,,{\k50}ka{\k30}ra{\k20}o{\k10}ke
Dialogue: 0,0:00:17.00,0:00:20.00,Default,,0,0,0,,Line one\NLine two
Dialogue: 1,0:00:21.00,0:00:24.00,Default,,0,0,0,,{\an7}Top left
Output
0:00:01.000,0:00:04.000
Hello there.
0:00:05.000,0:00:08.500
<i>Italic</i> and <b>bold</b> text.
0:00:09.000,0:00:12.000
Positioned
0:00:13.000,0:00:16.000
<c>ka</c><c>ra</c><c>o</c><c>ke</c>
0:00:17.000,0:00:20.000
Line one
Line two
0:00:21.000,0:00:24.000
Top left
Dropped in this output: styling, positioning, karaoke and format-specific content. Everything else matches line for line.
The same conversion on an awkward input
Input
[Script Info]
; 一份真实的脏文件：BOM + CRLF + 认不出的覆写码 + Comment + 坏时间码
Title: Dirty sample
ScriptType: v4.00+
[V4+ Styles]
Format: Name, Fontname, Fontsize, PrimaryColour, SecondaryColour, OutlineColour, BackColour, Bold, Italic, Underline, StrikeOut, ScaleX, ScaleY, Spacing, Angle, BorderStyle, Outline, Shadow, Alignment, MarginL, MarginR, MarginV, Encoding
Style: Default,Arial,20,&H00FFFFFF,&H000000FF,&H00000000,&H00000000,1,0,0,0,100,100,0,0,1,2,2,2,10,10,10,1
[Fonts]
fontname: Arial
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
[Events]
Format: Layer, Start, End, Style, Name, MarginL, MarginR, MarginV, Effect, Text
Comment: 0,0:00:00.00,0:00:01.00,Default,,0,0,0,,这是一条注释，不该变成字幕
Dialogue: 0,0:00:01.00,0:00:04.00,Default,,0,0,0,,Hello, world
Dialogue: 0,0:00:05.00,0:00:08.00,Default,,0,0,0,,{\fad(300,300)}Unmodelled override
Dialogue: 0,0:00:09.00,0:00:12.00,Default,,0,0,0,,{\an7\pos(320,240)}Both, wrong order
Dialogue: 0,0:00:13.00,0:00:16.5,Default,,0,0,0,,One decimal centisecond
Dialogue: 0,0:00:17.00,0:00:20.00,Default,,0,0,0,,Soft\nbreak
Dialogue: 0,0:00:xx.00,0:00:24.00,Default,,0,0,0,,Broken timecodeOutput
0:00:01.000,0:00:04.000
Hello, world
0:00:05.000,0:00:08.000
{\fad(300,300)}Unmodelled override
0:00:09.000,0:00:12.000
Both, wrong order
0:00:13.000,0:00:16.500
One decimal centisecond
0:00:17.000,0:00:20.000
Soft
break
This is the kind of damage real files have — mixed line endings, stray whitespace, fields left empty. Compare it with the tidy example above to see what the parser forgives.
Frequently asked questions
Do bold and italic survive from ASS into SBV?
Emphasis does; the style table does not. Formatting that belongs to a piece of text — bold, italic, underline, a colour — is written into the SBV text as tags (`<i>`, `<b>`, `<u>`, `<font color="…">`), because that is the one kind of styling a cue-level format can still carry. What is lost is everything the ASS file said globally: the font, its size, the outline, the shadow and the margins.
What happens to the on-screen position from ASS to SBV?
SBV cannot say where a subtitle is drawn, so the `\pos`, `\an` and `\move` codes are dropped on the way out of ASS, and every cue goes back to the default position the player chooses — the bottom of the frame, centred, for most of them.
What happens to karaoke timing from ASS to SBV?
The timing goes; the words stay. Karaoke lives in the `\k`, `\kf` and `\ko` codes an ASS event carries, which mark when each syllable lights up, and SBV has no way to record a moment inside a line — so the marks come off and the syllables arrive as ordinary SBV text.
What happens to ASS's `[Script Info]` block and the rest of the script in SBV?
Only the `Dialogue:` lines become subtitles. The `[Script Info]` block (title included — SBV has nowhere to put one), the style table, any `Comment:` lines and whatever is embedded in `[Fonts]` or `[Graphics]` are all dropped. For an ASS file whose styling was written by hand, this is the loss that shows most.
What does the output look like when ASS becomes SBV?
Like SBV: no cue numbers and no header — a line with the two times on it, and then the text. Every ASS cue becomes one SBV cue, in the same order, with the same text.
Are the ASS timings exact in the SBV file?
Yes, to the millisecond — which is as fine as either format goes. ASS writes a moment as `0:00:04.13` and SBV writes the same moment as `0:00:04.126`; nothing is rounded or shifted between the two, and a cue that was on screen for 2.9 seconds still is.
How does a two-line ASS cue come out in SBV?
As two lines, one under the other. The pairing survives — the two ASS lines still belong to one subtitle in the SBV output, and a player shows them together.
Do ASS cues keep their order in the SBV output?
Yes, and they are sorted by start time on the way — earliest first, which is how every format here expects them and how players read them. If your ASS file listed its cues out of sequence, the SBV output puts them back in order; that is a change to the file's structure rather than its content, and it is deliberate.
Can I convert the SBV back to ASS?
Yes, and it has its own list: converting SBV to ASS drops precision. That list is different from the one above because the two formats keep different things.
Does the SBV output keep the ASS file's encoding?
No — the output is UTF-8, with Unix line endings and no byte-order mark, whatever the ASS file used. A file that arrives in UTF-16, or in a Windows single-byte encoding, is decoded on the way in (the result panel says so when that happens); what comes out is always the same UTF-8 SBV.