How to turn on-screen subtitles into an SRT file

Updated October 14, 2026 · Peelframe

Before removing burned-in subtitles, it often pays to keep the words as text. You can translate them, put them back on the cleaned video in a new style, or upload them to YouTube as captions. The most widely used format for this is SRT.

What an SRT file looks like

SRT is a plain text file you can open in any text editor. Each subtitle has a number, a time range, the text and a blank line.

1
00:00:01,000 --> 00:00:03,200
Day three, a lake below the mountain

2
00:00:03,500 --> 00:00:06,000
The water was far clearer than I expected

Times are hours:minutes:seconds,milliseconds; the left side is when the line appears and the right side when it disappears. Almost every player, editor and YouTube reads this format.

Extracting SRT with Peelframe

1. Pick a video in the workspace.
2. If you only need the text, press Extract subtitle text only (SRT). After removing subtitles you can do the same from the result with Extract subtitle text (SRT).
3. Peelframe finds where each subtitle changes, reads the letters and lists them with their times. Recognition runs on your device; neither the video nor the text is sent to a server.
4. Click a time to jump the video there, compare with the picture and correct mistakes in place.
5. Press Save SRT file, or Copy text only if you do not need the timing.

Checking the recognized text

• Look-alike characters go wrong most often: the digit 0 and the letter O, 1 and l, small Hangul final consonants.
• Decorative fonts (handwriting, thick outlines, gradients) are harder to read. Compare those lines with the picture.
• Very small or faint text and emoji may be skipped. Type in any missing lines yourself.
• Pick the subtitle language: before extracting, choose the recognition model that matches the subtitles under Subtitle text language (SRT): Korean, Japanese/Chinese or Latin alphabet (English, Spanish, Portuguese, Indonesian and others). Each is downloaded once, the first time you use it. With the wrong language, the text comes out garbled.
• Check for a sentence split across two entries or one subtitle captured twice. Two entries with nearly the same time are usually better merged.

Putting the SRT to use

• Translation: change only the text lines and keep the time lines, and you have subtitles in another language. If you use a translator, check afterwards that the time lines were not altered.
• Restyle: load the cleaned video and the SRT into an editor and set a new font and position.
• YouTube captions: upload a file with timing from the subtitles menu in YouTube Studio. Viewers can then switch the captions on and off with CC, and unlike burned-in text they can be searched and auto-translated.
• Notes and summaries: copy the text only and use it as a starting point for notes or a blog post.

To remove the subtitles themselves, see four ways compared; before reusing subtitles from someone else's video, read the copyright checklist.