How to open a subtitle file online
Three steps, a few seconds, no software.
Open your .SBV file
Drop it on the box, choose it from your device, or paste its text straight in.
View every line
See the start, end, duration and reading speed of each line, with any problems flagged.
Preview, fix, convert
Play the lines over your video, shift the timing, then download in the format you need.
What is a .SBV file?
Timed text that appears on top of a video.
An SBV file holds video captions as plain text with timecodes. It is the format YouTube uses when you download or upload captions in YouTube Studio. Open it in any text editor or in Subtitle Edit. To use the captions in a media player or on another platform, convert the SBV to SRT or WebVTT first.
Programs that open .SBV files
| Full name | SubViewer / YouTube Caption File |
|---|---|
| Developer | Google (YouTube SBV variant); SubViewer format origin |
| First released | Used by YouTube's caption tooling since the late 2000s (SubViewer-derived format) |
| Category | Text & Code |
| MIME type | text/plain |
Related viewers
Every viewer is free to use.
Frequently asked questions
Is my .SBV file uploaded?
No. The file is read by your browser. If you preview with a video, the video is also played locally.
My .SBV file is out of sync. Can I fix it?
Yes. If they're early or late by a fixed amount, enter the difference in milliseconds and click Shift. If they drift more and more over time, the frame rate is wrong: use Change FPS (for example 25 → 23.976).
Why are some characters broken (é, ł)?
Older subtitles are often saved in a regional encoding like Windows-1250. We detect it automatically and every download is saved as UTF-8, which works everywhere.
What do the warnings mean?
Overlap: two lines on screen at once. Too fast: more than 20 characters per second. Too short: under 0.83 s. Long line: over 42 characters. 3+ lines: too much text at once.
Can I convert ASS to SRT?
Yes. Italic, bold and underline are kept; positioning and karaoke effects are dropped because SRT can't store them.
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