Roku Media Player Subtitles: Getting Your Own SRT and VTT Files to Show

What Roku Media Player actually supports

Roku's own support article on Roku Media Player is short, and every rule in it matters. It describes subtitle support like this:

Embedded tracks

Subtitles embedded in .mkv files, chosen with the Star button while the video plays

Sidecar files

.srt and .vtt files are included automatically if they sit in the same folder as the video and have the same name

Several languages

Each file needs a language extension, such as movie.eng.srt and movie.ger.srt

Roku TV models

After pressing Star, you also need to select Accessibility to reach the subtitle setting

Where files come from

A USB drive on Roku devices that have a USB port, or a DLNA media server on the same network

Two things are notable by their absence. The article mentions no sidecar format other than SRT and VTT, so ASS, SSA, SUB, SMI and SBV files beside the video should be treated as unsupported. And it lists embedded subtitles only for MKV, not for MP4 or MOV.

Diagnose by symptom

• The video doesn't appear in the folder at all. Roku Media Player hides files it can't play, so this is a video format problem, not a subtitle one. Roku lists H.264 in MKV, MP4 and MOV as the baseline; HEVC, VP9 and AV1 only play on some 4K and 8K models.
• The video plays but Star shows no subtitle choice. The sidecar file wasn't matched (name, folder or extension), or it's in a format Roku doesn't read.
• Star shows a subtitle choice but nothing appears. The track may be switched off, the file may be empty or broken, or an embedded track may be in a form the player doesn't render.
• Subtitles appear but drift further out of time as the film goes on. The file was made for a different frame rate version of the video.
• Accented letters or non-Latin scripts look wrong. The file isn't in an encoding the player reads; re-save it as UTF-8.

Name and place the files the way Roku expects

1. Put the video and subtitle in the same folder on the USB drive. Roku Media Player reads drives formatted as FAT16, FAT32, NTFS, EXT2, EXT3, exFAT or HFS+.
2. Give the subtitle exactly the video's name with a .srt or .vtt extension: Trip to Lisbon.mp4 and Trip to Lisbon.srt.
3. For more than one language, add a language code before the extension, following Roku's own pattern: Trip to Lisbon.eng.srt, Trip to Lisbon.por.srt. Roku's examples use three-letter codes, so use those rather than guessing whether two-letter codes work.
4. Make sure the extension is real. A file shown as Trip to Lisbon.srt on a computer that hides extensions may actually be Trip to Lisbon.srt.txt.
5. Plug the drive in, open Roku Media Player, choose Video, select the drive and play the file.
6. Press Star on the remote during playback and choose the subtitle track. On a Roku TV, select Accessibility in that menu first.

If you have already built the habit of naming files for Plex or Jellyfin, most of it carries over; the differences between players are covered in subtitle file naming.

Subtitles in other formats: convert them to SRT

Because Roku only reads SRT and VTT sidecars, a subtitle file in another format has to be converted. The free converters below run in your browser, so the subtitle file isn't uploaded anywhere, and they show a preview of the first lines before you download.

• ASS or SSA, typical for anime and fansubs: the ASS to SRT converter keeps the text and timing, drops fonts, colours and positions, and flags lines that were positioned on screen, such as signs, so you can check them.
• MicroDVD .sub, common with older films: these files count frames rather than time, so the SUB to SRT converter asks for the video's frame rate (23.976, 25 and so on) unless the file states one.
• SBV from YouTube and TTML or DFXP from streaming and broadcast workflows have their own converters on the tools pages.

A .sub file paired with an .idx file is a different thing: VobSub, images of subtitles taken from a DVD. It isn't text, so no format converter can turn it into SRT; it would need OCR.

Subtitles inside MKV files

Roku Media Player supports embedded MKV subtitles, but Roku doesn't publish which track types it renders. Forum reports from Roku users often involve two kinds of track: heavily styled ASS tracks and image-based PGS tracks from Blu-ray rips. If an embedded track doesn't show, the quickest test is to turn it into a sidecar.

The free extract subtitles tool lists every subtitle track in an MKV in your browser, with language and default or forced flags, and saves a chosen text track as SRT or VTT. Name the result after the video, copy it next to the MKV, and pick it with Star. PGS and VobSub tracks appear in the list but can't be saved as text.

Subtitles that drift out of sync

Subtitles that start in sync and slowly fall behind, or run ahead, usually come from a release at a different frame rate: a 25 fps European version of a film runs about 4 percent faster than a 23.976 fps version, so subtitles timed for one drift steadily against the other. The subtitle frame rate converter rescales every timestamp from one rate to another, for example from 23.976 to 25. A constant offset, where every line is late by the same amount, is a simpler shift that any subtitle editor can apply.

Two examples

Playing from Plex, Jellyfin or another server

Roku Media Player can browse a DLNA server on the home network, and Roku notes that servers such as Plex and Serviio can transcode videos into a format the Roku plays. Roku's support article doesn't say whether sidecar subtitles come through the same way over DLNA; that depends on the server software, so if a file works from USB but not over the network, look at the server's subtitle settings.

The dedicated Plex, Jellyfin and Emby apps for Roku are separate from Roku Media Player and follow their own server's rules. Their forums trace many missing-subtitle cases to transcoding settings and subtitle formats the Roku app can't display directly, so check those apps' own documentation rather than applying Roku Media Player's rules.

The fallback that always works: burn the subtitles in

If the file is named correctly, in SRT, and still doesn't show, or you want a video that plays with subtitles on any Roku without menu steps, burn the subtitles into the picture. The free subtitle editor opens the video in your browser on a computer, imports an SRT or VTT, lets you set the font, colours, a background box and the position, and renders an MP4 with the subtitles drawn into the frames. The video stays on your device. Rendering needs a computer with Chrome or Edge 94 or later, Safari 16.4 or later, or Firefox 130 or later.

Burned-in subtitles can't be turned off and there's one language per file, so keep the original video if you want to offer a version without them. Check that the rendered MP4 shows up in Roku Media Player's folder view; if it does, the subtitles will play.

What can't be fixed on the Roku side

• Subtitle appearance. The Roku draws sidecar text in its own style, and the fonts, colours and positions inside an ASS file don't survive conversion to SRT.
• Image-based tracks that Roku doesn't render. Without OCR, the only routes are a text version of the subtitles or burning them in with desktop software that can read PGS.
• Formats or codecs Roku doesn't list. If Roku Media Player hides the video, re-encode the video; renaming files won't help.
• DRM-protected files, which Roku Media Player doesn't play.

Making subtitles for your own videos

For a video with no subtitle file, the subtitle generator transcribes the speech into SRT or VTT in 100 languages for 1 credit per minute, with a 5-credit minimum per file: a 25-minute video costs 25 credits (2.5¢). For the AI step only the audio is uploaded, and it's deleted within 30 minutes of the job finishing. Name the SRT after the video and it's ready for Roku Media Player.