VTT to TXT: Turn WebVTT Captions into Plain Text

How to convert VTT to TXT

1. Drop the .vtt file into the box above. The file card shows how many captions were read, the detected format and when the last caption ends.
2. Read the notes. If any block had no timing line, an unreadable time or no text, the note counts how many were skipped.
3. Check the first captions in the preview panel.
4. Keep "Plain text (.txt)" under "Save as", or pick SRT if you need a subtitle file instead.
5. Press "Convert and download". The text file keeps the original name with .txt at the end.

What is removed and what stays

A WebVTT file is mostly structure. Here is what the converter does with each part:

Header

The WEBVTT line at the top and any text after it are dropped

NOTE, STYLE and REGION blocks

Skipped entirely, so comments and styling rules never reach the text

Cue identifiers

Numbers or names above a timing line are ignored

Timing lines and cue settings

Removed, including align, line, position and size settings after the times

Tags

Voice tags, class tags, italics, bold and the inline timestamps some files put between words are removed

Character codes

&, <, >,  , " and ' become the characters they stand for

Caption text

Kept, one caption per line, with a two-line caption joined into a single line by a space

Captions are written in time order. Nothing is rewritten or corrected: spelling, filler words and any mistakes in the captions come through exactly as they were.

Before and after

The note, the cue number, the timing, the alignment setting and the voice tag are all gone. The tag's speaker name went with it, which is the next point.

Speaker names in voice tags

WebVTT can mark who is speaking with a voice tag, written as <v Name> before the words. Some meeting and lecture tools use it; others write the name as ordinary text at the start of the caption, such as "Priya: Okay". The converter removes tags, so a name inside a voice tag disappears, while a name written as ordinary text stays.

If you need the names, use find-and-replace in any text editor before converting: replace each <v Priya> with "Priya: ", once per speaker. Leave the closing </v> tags alone; they are removed anyway. The names are then plain text and survive the conversion. Don't replace every > character in the file, because the --> arrows in the timing lines need it.

Rolling captions repeat themselves

Automatic captions on some video sites scroll: a line appears at the bottom, moves up when the next one arrives, and is shown again in the next caption. VTT files saved from those players, often by download tools, can contain each line two or more times, sometimes with timestamps between the words. The converter removes the inline timestamps, but it keeps every caption as written, so the repeated lines remain in the text.

You can delete the repeats by hand in a short file. For a long recording, it is often quicker to skip the caption file and transcribe the video's own audio with video to text, which gives one clean TXT, SRT or VTT transcript in 100 languages for 1 credit (0.1¢) per minute, minimum 5 credits per file. A 45-minute lecture costs 45 credits (4.5¢). That transcript doesn't include speaker names either.

When you need paragraphs or timestamps

This page writes one caption per line with no times, which suits pasting into a search, a spreadsheet cell or an AI tool. For reading, paragraphs work better. Save an SRT here, then open it in SRT to Word: its "Plain transcript paragraphs" layout starts a new paragraph after every pause of two seconds or more, and "Lines with start times" puts an [hh:mm:ss] time in front of each line for quoting. How to format a transcript covers layouts for interviews and meetings.

SRT files, and the other direction

The converter reads SRT as well, and gives the same plain text. For a manual method with a text editor, and the reasoning behind each step, see SRT to plain text.

If you only came to change the subtitle format, saving as SRT here works, and the VTT to SRT page explains the differences between the two formats. What is a VTT file walks through every part of the format, if the input looks unfamiliar.

What people do with the text

• Turn a recorded meeting's captions into minutes or action points; meeting recording to notes suggests a structure.
• Quote a lecture or a talk accurately in an essay, with the video's time found again from the original VTT.
• Search a long recording for a term, or paste the text into a summariser.
• Keep a readable archive copy of captions next to the video.

Limits

• One file at a time, up to 20 MB, text captions only.
• Repeated rolling-caption lines are not merged, and voice-tag names are not converted into labels.
• Files that aren't UTF-8 or UTF-16 are read as Windows-1252 with a note; if letters look wrong, repair the file with the subtitle encoding converter first.
• The text stays in its original language; the converter never translates.