Glossary
SRT vs VTT vs Markdown transcripts
Updated · By the WithTranscript team · How we checked
SRT vs VTT vs Markdown transcripts: SRT and VTT are subtitle formats: numbered or timed cues that a video player shows on screen. A Markdown transcript is a document for reading: headings, paragraphs and optional timestamps, built for people and AI assistants rather than players.
SRT (SubRip) is the oldest and most widely supported: a counter, a time range like 00:01:02,500 --> 00:01:05,000, and one or two lines of text, repeated. WebVTT (.vtt) is the web standard behind HTML5 <track> captions: it starts with a WEBVTT line, uses a dot for milliseconds, and can carry styling and positioning. YouTube lists both among its supported subtitle file formats.
Both are cut into short cues of a few seconds, because they are meant to sit on top of a video. Read as a document they are choppy: sentences break mid-way, and timing lines take up a third of the file.
Markdown is plain text with light markup (# headings, ** for bold, lists). A Markdown transcript joins cues into paragraphs, can put chapter headings in, and keeps a timestamp per paragraph instead of per cue. It pastes cleanly into notes apps (Notion, Obsidian) and into ChatGPT or Claude, which read Markdown structure well.
Pick SRT or VTT when the transcript goes back onto a video (editing, re-uploading, a player). Pick TXT or Markdown when people or an AI will read it.
How WithTranscript handles it
WithTranscript copies transcripts as Markdown (title, source link, chapters, a timestamp per paragraph) and serves the same Markdown at a transcript.md URL. It does not export SRT or VTT; if you need subtitle files, several tools in the comparison do.