SSA to SRT
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 SSA to SRT. Drop a file in — or paste the text — and you get the SRT 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 SRT. 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 SSA file, converted to SRT
Input
[Script Info]
Title: Example SSA
ScriptType: v4.00
Collisions: Normal
[V4 Styles]
Format: Name, Fontname, Fontsize, PrimaryColour, SecondaryColour, TertiaryColour, BackColour, Bold, Italic, BorderStyle, Outline, Shadow, Alignment, MarginL, MarginR, MarginV, AlphaLevel, Encoding
Style: Default,Arial,20,&H00FFFFFF,&H000000FF,&H00000000,&H00000000,0,0,1,2,2,2,10,10,10,0,1
[Events]
Format: Marked, Start, End, Style, Name, MarginL, MarginR, MarginV, Effect, Text
Dialogue: Marked=0,0:00:01.00,0:00:04.00,Default,,0,0,0,,Hello there.
Dialogue: Marked=0,0:00:05.00,0:00:08.00,Default,,0,0,0,,{\i1}Italic{\i0} line.
Dialogue: Marked=0,0:00:09.00,0:00:12.00,Default,,0,0,0,,Two\Nlines
Output
1
00:00:01,000 --> 00:00:04,000
Hello there.
2
00:00:05,000 --> 00:00:08,000
<i>Italic</i> line.
3
00:00:09,000 --> 00:00:12,000
Two
lines
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]
Title: Dirty SSA
ScriptType: v4.00
[V4 Styles]
Format: Name, Fontname, Fontsize, PrimaryColour, SecondaryColour, TertiaryColour, BackColour, Bold, Italic, BorderStyle, Outline, Shadow, Alignment, MarginL, MarginR, MarginV, AlphaLevel, Encoding
Style: Default,Arial,20,&H00FFFFFF,&H000000FF,&H00000000,&H00000000,0,0,1,2,2,2,10,10,10,0,1
[Events]
Format: Marked, Start, End, Style, Name, MarginL, MarginR, MarginV, Effect, Text
Comment: Marked=0,0:00:00.00,0:00:01.00,Default,,0,0,0,,not a subtitle
Dialogue: Marked=0,0:00:01.00,0:00:04.00,Default,,0,0,0,,{\b1}Bold{\b0} and {\u1}underlined{\u0}.
Dialogue: Marked=0,0:00:05.00,0:00:08.00,Default,,0,0,0,,A soft\nbreak and a {\p1}mystery{\p0} code.Output
1
00:00:01,000 --> 00:00:04,000
<b>Bold</b> and <u>underlined</u>.
2
00:00:05,000 --> 00:00:08,000
A soft
break and a {\p1}mystery{\p0} code.
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 SSA into SRT?
Emphasis does; the style table does not. Formatting that belongs to a piece of text — bold, italic, underline, a colour — is written into the SRT 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 SSA file said globally: the font, its size, the outline, the shadow and the margins.
What happens to the on-screen position from SSA to SRT?
SRT cannot say where a subtitle is drawn, so the `\pos`, `\an` and `\move` codes are dropped on the way out of SSA, 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 SSA to SRT?
The timing goes; the words stay. Karaoke lives in the `\k`, `\kf` and `\ko` codes an SSA event carries, which mark when each syllable lights up, and SRT has no way to record a moment inside a line — so the marks come off and the syllables arrive as ordinary SRT text.
What happens to SSA's `[Script Info]` block and the rest of the script in SRT?
Only the `Dialogue:` lines become subtitles. The `[Script Info]` block (title included — SRT has nowhere to put one), the style table, any `Comment:` lines and whatever is embedded in `[Fonts]` or `[Graphics]` are all dropped. For an SSA file whose styling was written by hand, this is the loss that shows most.
What does the output look like when SSA becomes SRT?
Like SRT: a number above every timecode, counting from 1. Every SSA cue becomes one SRT cue, in the same order, with the same text.
Are the SSA timings exact in the SRT file?
Yes, to the millisecond — which is as fine as either format goes. SSA writes a moment as `0:00:04.13` and SRT writes the same moment as `00:00:04,126`; 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 SSA cue come out in SRT?
As two lines, one under the other. The pairing survives — the two SSA lines still belong to one subtitle in the SRT output, and a player shows them together.
Do SSA cues keep their order in the SRT 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 SSA file listed its cues out of sequence, the SRT 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 SRT back to SSA?
Yes, and it has its own list: converting SRT to SSA drops precision. That list is different from the one above because the two formats keep different things.
Does the SRT output keep the SSA file's encoding?
No — the output is UTF-8, with Unix line endings and no byte-order mark, whatever the SSA 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 SRT.