ASS to SRT Converter

How to convert ASS to SRT

1. Drop the .ass or .ssa file into the box above. The file card shows how many subtitles were read, whether the file was recognised as ASS or SSA, and when the last line ends.
2. Read the notes under the file name. They say how many lines carried an on-screen position, how many vector drawings and commented-out lines were skipped, and whether the file had to be read in a fallback encoding.
3. Pick SRT or WebVTT under "Save as" and look over the first subtitles in the preview panel.
4. Press "Convert and download". The new file keeps the original name with the new extension.

One line, before and after

Three things happened. ASS writes time as H:MM:SS.cc, with hundredths of a second, while SRT uses HH:MM:SS,mmm, so .52 became ,520 with no rounding. The {\i1} and {\i0} blocks were removed, so the word is no longer italic. And the \N hard break became a real line break. The style name (Main) and the speaker field (Kenji) have no place in SRT and are not carried over.

The comma after "Wait" survives because the converter reads the column order from the Format line of the [Events] section. Text is always the last column in ASS, so everything after the ninth comma is treated as text, commas included.

What ASS to SRT keeps and what it drops

Kept

Dialogue text, start and end times, and line breaks

Converted

\N and lowercase \n both become line breaks; \h becomes a non-breaking space

Removed

Every override block in braces: italics, bold, colour, \pos, \move, \fad, \an alignment, karaoke \k timing and notes written inside braces

Skipped and counted

Vector drawings (\p1 and higher), which contain no words, and Comment: lines

Not carried

The [V4+ Styles] section, actor names, margins, layers, the Effect field and embedded fonts

One detail about lowercase \n: in most ASS renderers it is only a break when the script uses wrap style 2, and otherwise shows as a space. The converter treats it as a break, so if a line splits in an odd place, check it in the preview.

Signs, karaoke and layered lines

Anime releases often use ASS for much more than dialogue. Translated signs are pinned to a wall with \pos, opening songs are timed syllable by syllable with \k, and some effects stack two or three copies of the same line on different layers, one for the outline and one for the fill. Each of these is a Dialogue line with words in it, so the converter keeps its text. It counts lines that had a position or alignment tag and mentions them in the notes, so you can see that signs were present.

What it does not do is decide which lines are signs and delete them, or merge duplicate layers. If the SRT comes out with sign text mixed into the dialogue, or a karaoke line repeated, clean the ASS first. In Aegisub, sort the grid by style, select the sign and song styles, delete them and save a copy. In a text editor you can do the same by removing every Dialogue line whose Style column is, for example, Sign or OP. Then convert the cleaned copy.

Lines that sat at the top of the screen

ASS uses numpad numbers for alignment, and {\an8} puts a line at top centre, usually to keep it clear of on-screen text. That tag is removed here, so those lines will appear at the bottom like everything else. Some players honour {\an8} typed at the start of an SRT line, but support is uneven. Moving subtitles to the top covers the options when placement really matters.

SSA files

SSA v4 is the older version of the format. Its event lines start with a Marked field where ASS has Layer, and its styles section is called [V4 Styles]. Because column positions come from the file's own Format line, SSA converts the same way as ASS, and the file card says which one was detected.

Why convert, and when to keep the ASS

• Televisions and set-top boxes that play files from a USB stick usually read SRT, and many ignore ASS; see subtitles on a TV from USB.
• YouTube's list of supported caption files includes SRT, SBV, WebVTT and TTML, but not ASS. Uploading subtitles to YouTube walks through the Studio side.
• Many video editors import SRT for captions and treat ASS inconsistently or not at all.
• The mydubly subtitle editor imports SRT and VTT, not ASS, so convert first if you want to fix lines there.

Keep the original if you watch in a player with a full ASS renderer, such as mpv or VLC. Different renderers still disagree on some tags, but the styling is the reason the file exists. If the subtitles are a track inside an MKV, pull them out first with extract subtitles from video, then convert.

Keep a look by burning it in

When the target can't show styled subtitles at all, the alternative is to put the text into the picture. Convert to SRT, open the video and the SRT in the subtitle editor, pick one of its 8 presets or 19 fonts, set a colour and a position, and render an MP4 with the subtitles burned in. It applies one style to the whole video, so per-line positions and karaoke can't be rebuilt. Rendering needs Chrome or Edge 94+, Safari 16.4+ or Firefox 130+ on a computer.

Limits

• Text tracks only. Files over 20 MB are refused, because no real subtitle file is that large.
• Files that are not UTF-8 or UTF-16 are read as Windows-1252 and a note says so. If Cyrillic, Greek or other letters look wrong, repair the file with the subtitle encoding converter first.
• The converter changes the format, never the language. To get subtitles in another language, the AI subtitle generator creates them from the video's audio at 1 credit (0.1¢) per minute, with a minimum of 5 credits per file.
• Going the other way? SRT to ASS writes a styled script from a plain SRT.