Convert SBV to TXT

Free, instant, and entirely in your browser — your subtitle file is never uploaded.

100% private — your subtitles never leave your device
Drop your SBV file here, or click to browse

About SBV files

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.

About TXT files

Plain text is the subtitle with the subtitle part removed: the spoken lines, in order, with no timing at all.

Converting SBV to TXT, specifically

This is how a creator gets the transcript of their own video. Download the captions from YouTube Studio, convert here, and you have the spoken content as plain prose — ready to become a blog post, show notes, a description, subtitles for another language, or training material. It is one of the most useful conversions on the site precisely because the hard part, matching words to speech, was already done by YouTube.

Why convert to TXT

You want plain text because you are done with the video. Reading the transcript, counting words, feeding the script to a translator or a language model, quoting a line in a document — all of it is easier without timestamps in the way. This is the one conversion here you should expect to be one-way.

What converting SBV to TXT actually does

This one throws the timing away. Everything a subtitle knows about *when* a line appears lives in its timestamps, and plain text has none — so what comes out is the dialogue, in order, and nothing else. That is exactly right when you want to read the transcript, run a word count, or paste the script somewhere; it is the wrong move if you ever intend to put it back on a video, because there is no way to recover what was discarded.

How to convert SBV to TXT

  1. Drop your SBV file onto the box above, or paste the text straight in.
  2. The file is read on your device — it is never uploaded anywhere.
  3. Press convert. You get a TXT file back immediately.
  4. Anything the conversion could not carry over is listed on screen, so you know before you use the file.

Questions

Is my SBV file uploaded to a server?

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.

Does converting SBV to TXT lose anything?

This is how a creator gets the transcript of their own video. Download the captions from YouTube Studio, convert here, and you have the spoken content as plain prose — ready to become a blog post, show notes, a description, subtitles for another language, or training material. It is one of the most useful conversions on the site precisely because the hard part, matching words to speech, was already done by YouTube.

What if my file is not really SBV?

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.

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