Free, instant, and entirely in your browser — your subtitle file is never uploaded.
MicroDVD counts frames, not seconds — this has to match the video.
SBV is YouTube's own caption format, and about as simple as SRT with one line less: no sequence number, and the two timestamps separated by a comma rather than an arrow.
MicroDVD is the odd one out: it counts frames, not time. Each line is {start}{end} followed by the text, with a pipe between display lines. There is no timestamp anywhere in the file.
An unusual pairing that turns up in one situation: someone has pulled captions off YouTube for a video they also hold as an old file, and the old file's player wants .sub. The text and timing cross over exactly as far as the formats allow — both hold the same simple thing — but SBV thinks in time and MicroDVD thinks in frames, so the rate below is what decides whether the two halves of your evening line up.
You want MicroDVD because something old needs feeding: a DivX-era AVI, a hardware player, a set-top box that was never updated. It is not a format anyone chooses for new work, and going into it means committing to one frame rate for the life of the file — which is why the control above matters more here than anywhere else on the site.
Both sides carry the same thing — lines of text with a start and an end — so this is the cleanest conversion in the set. Nothing is approximated and nothing is thrown away; the timestamps are rewritten in the target's notation and the text goes across as it stands. What changes is compatibility: which players, platforms and browsers will accept the file you end up with. Because MicroDVD is the destination here, the frame rate is a decision you are making rather than one you are reading. Every timestamp is multiplied by it and rounded to a whole frame, so the file you get is locked to that rate: correct on a video that runs at it, and progressively wrong on one that does not. Set it to match the video before you convert, not after.
No. The conversion runs in your browser using JavaScript — your SBV file is read from disk, converted in memory and handed back as a download. Nothing is transmitted, so there is nothing for us to store or delete. You can disconnect from the internet after this page loads and the conversion still works.
An unusual pairing that turns up in one situation: someone has pulled captions off YouTube for a video they also hold as an old file, and the old file's player wants .sub. The text and timing cross over exactly as far as the formats allow — both hold the same simple thing — but SBV thinks in time and MicroDVD thinks in frames, so the rate below is what decides whether the two halves of your evening line up.
The page checks before it converts. Subtitle formats are identified by what is inside the file rather than by the extension — which matters, because .sub alone is used by three unrelated formats. If you hand this page something that is not SBV, it says so and points you at the all-format converter instead of producing a broken file.