VTT to CSV
Or paste subtitle text
What this conversion changes
2 things are dropped or need a decision
- Styling
all styling (bold, italic, colour, outline, shadow)
- 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 VTT to CSV. Drop a file in — or paste the text — and you get the CSV 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 and format-specific content have nowhere to go in CSV. 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 VTT file, converted to CSV
Input
WEBVTT
intro
00:00:01.000 --> 00:00:04.000
Hello there.
00:00:04.500 --> 00:00:08.000 align:start position:10%
Second line with <i>italics</i>.
Output
start,end,text
00:00:01.000,00:00:04.000,Hello there.
00:00:04.500,00:00:08.000,Second line with <i>italics</i>.
Dropped in this output: styling and format-specific content. Everything else matches line for line.
The same conversion on an awkward input
Input
a stray comment line
cue-id-1
00:00:01.000 --> 00:00:02.000
No header, two lines before the timecode.
Output
start,end,text
00:00:01.000,00:00:02.000,"No header, two lines before the timecode."
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 VTT into CSV?
Emphasis does; the style table does not. Formatting that belongs to a piece of text — bold, italic, underline, a colour — is written into the CSV 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 VTT file said globally: the font, its size, the outline, the shadow and the margins.
What happens to VTT's NOTE, STYLE and REGION blocks in CSV?
They are dropped. A WebVTT file can carry a header, comments, a style block, region definitions and per-cue settings such as `align` or `position`, and CSV has nowhere to put them — it stores cues, not a document. The cues themselves, text and timings, come through whole.
What does the output look like when VTT becomes CSV?
Like CSV: a header row (`start,end,text`) and then one row per cue. Every VTT cue becomes one CSV cue, in the same order, with the same text.
Are the VTT timings exact in the CSV file?
Yes, to the millisecond — which is as fine as either format goes. Both VTT and CSV write a moment the same way, `00:00:04.126`, so the timecodes come out character for character as they went in.
How does a two-line VTT cue come out in CSV?
As two lines inside the one text cell, quoted the way CSV requires. The pairing survives — the two VTT lines still belong to one subtitle in the CSV output, and a player shows them together.
Do VTT cues keep their order in the CSV 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 VTT file listed its cues out of sequence, the CSV 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 CSV back to VTT?
Yes, and that direction costs nothing: a CSV file holds less than VTT can, so nothing further is dropped on the way back. What this direction dropped stays dropped, though — styling and format-specific content cannot be rebuilt from a CSV file, because nothing in it records what they were.
Does the CSV output keep the VTT file's encoding?
No — the output is UTF-8, with Unix line endings and no byte-order mark, whatever the VTT 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 CSV.