David Thompson

David Thompson at

Motivated by a ticket in my queue at the FSF, I realized that the HTML5 video tag is capable of handling subtitles, but it seems that SRT format is not supported (at least not in Mozilla-based browsers, AFAICT).  HTML5 video uses the WebVTT format, which looks very much like SRT.  It shouldn't be that difficult to convert from one to the other, I thought, but the only tool I could find to do it quickly and easily (and the one that Mozilla recommends) was SaSS.  So, I decided to head down the rabbit hole of writing my own SRT to WebVTT converter in my free time and this is the result: https://gitorious.org/davexunit/srt2vtt

Is there already a free, easy-to-use, more robust converter out there already that I just didn't find and thus wasted my time?  Probably, but it was a fun hack.

Jason Self likes this.

I understand that FFmpeg finally has support for including WebVTT subittles in the videos. So there's another option.

Jason Self at 2015-01-08T23:25:40Z

I never heard of WebVTT before, but sooner or later mplayer will probably support it, and support converting to it. :-)

Claes Wallin (韋嘉誠) at 2015-01-09T21:41:45Z