Flatten a styled subtitle file down to plain SubRip. Read the part about what gets thrown away first.
Open a project in the editor and go to Captions. You can start from a video you are captioning, or from nothing at all if you only need the file converted.
Bring in the ASS file. The cues and their timings are read in as they are, so nothing is re-timed and nothing is re-transcribed.
Export as SRT. You can also burn the captions into the video instead if you would rather they could never go missing.
Advanced SubStation Alpha carries an entire presentation layer: named styles, fonts, colours, outlines, positioning, rotation, and the override tags that produce karaoke timing and on-screen effects. SubRip carries none of it.
So converting ASS to SRT keeps the words and the timings and discards everything about how they looked. For a normal dialogue track that is exactly what you want, because the destination is usually a platform that would have ignored the styling anyway.
For a file where the styling is the point, typesetting that labels signs in a scene, karaoke, or captions positioned to avoid burned-in text, converting to SubRip destroys the work. Burning the ASS file into the video keeps the appearance permanently instead.
| Feature | In the ASS file | After converting to SRT |
|---|---|---|
| Dialogue text | Yes | Kept |
| Timings | Yes | Kept |
| Font, size, colour | Yes | Lost |
| On-screen positioning | Yes | Lost |
| Karaoke and effects | Yes | Lost |
Yes, all of it. Fonts, colours, outlines, positioning and any karaoke or effect tags are discarded, because SubRip has no way to express them. The text and timings are kept exactly.
Burn them into the video. Rendering the captions into the frames keeps the appearance you designed, and the result plays anywhere without a subtitle file at all.
Free, in the browser, and the captions can be burned into the video in the same place.