Converts Advanced SubStation Alpha to SubRip. ASS carries full typesetting — fonts, colours, outlines, rotation, karaoke — and almost nothing outside a desktop player renders any of it. Converting makes the loss explicit rather than leaving you wondering why the subtitles look wrong.
What is removed, in detail
Override tags — everything in braces: {\an8} to move a line to the top, {\b1} for bold, {\pos(320,240)} for absolute placement, {\k50} for karaoke. All stripped, because SRT has no syntax for any of them.
Styles — the [V4+ Styles] section defines named looks that dialogue lines refer to. There is nowhere to put them.
Drawing commands — ASS can draw vector shapes with {\p1}. Those cues become empty text, which is correct: there was no text in them.
Layers and effects — karaoke, scrolling credits, animated signs. Gone.
What survives is the timing and the words, which is what SRT is.
Line breaks and comments
\N; those become real newlines. A hard space, \h, becomes an ordinary space. Lines beginning with Comment: rather than Dialogue: are ignored, which is exactly what a player does — they are usually typesetting notes or alternative translations left in by the author.What gets checked while converting
Cues out of order — some editors append late additions at the end of the file. They are sorted, and you are told it happened.
Zero-length or reversed cues — an end time at or before the start. Players skip these silently, so they are given a one-second duration instead.
Overlaps — two cues on screen at once. Left alone by default because some formats use it deliberately for speaker labels; there is an option to trim them.
Malformed blocks — anything without a readable timestamp is skipped and counted, rather than corrupting the cue numbering.
Other names for this
Also searched as “advanced substation to srt”, “ass subtitles to srt”, “anime subs to srt”.
Questions
- Can I keep the styling?
- Not in SRT — the format has no styling at all. If the typesetting matters, keep the .ass file and use a player that renders it, such as VLC or mpv.
- Some of my cues came out empty.
- Those were drawing commands or pure typesetting rather than dialogue. There was no text in them to keep.
- What about .ssa files?
- Same reader. SSA is the earlier version of the same format with a smaller style model, and the dialogue lines are structurally identical.
- My accented characters come out as gibberish.
- The file is not UTF-8 — usually Windows-1252 from an older tool, or UTF-16 from Notepad. Both are detected and decoded automatically here. If characters are still wrong, the source file itself declares the wrong encoding.
- Is my subtitle file uploaded?
- No. The parsing and rewriting happen in this tab. Subtitle files often contain an unreleased script or a client’s content, which is a good reason not to send them to a stranger’s server. Turn your Wi-Fi off and the tool keeps working.