Subtitle Edit
YouTube Timed Text Styles
YouTube timed text (.ytt, also called srv3) is the format YouTube’s player reads natively. Besides text and timing it has pens (text styles), window positions and window styles, plus per-word timing for karaoke. Subtitle Edit reads and writes all of them, previews them on the video like YouTube draws them, and has a style manager for them.
Toolbar: the styles button (shown when the current format is YouTube timed text)
Right-click a line: YouTube → line pen, position, window style
Right-click in the text box: YouTube → set pen for selection, karaoke start, remove pen tags
How the Text Looks
A line has one pen, position and window style of its own, and parts of it can use another pen:
Plain text <s p="3">in pen 3</s> and <s t="1500">appears 1.5 s into the line</s>
<s p="N">— this part uses pen N.<s t="ms">— karaoke: this part appears ms milliseconds after the line starts.<i>,<b>,<u>and<font color>also work; they are turned into pens when the file is saved.{\an8}and the other ASSA alignment tags become a window position when saved.
The text box colors the pen number in the pen’s text color, and the grid’s “show formatting” mode shows pens as they look (bold, italic, color).
Pens
| Setting | Attribute | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Bold, italic, underline | b, i, u |
|
| Text color + opacity | fc, fo |
opacity 0–255 |
| Background + opacity | bc, bo |
the box behind the text |
| Edge | et, ec |
hard shadow, bevel, glow/outline, soft shadow; without a color the edge is dark gray and follows the text opacity |
| Font style | fs |
Courier New, Times New Roman, Lucida Console, Roboto, Comic Sans, Monotype Corsiva, small caps |
| Size | sz |
not a real percentage: YouTube draws 100 + (sz − 100) / 4 %, so 200 is 125% and 0 (the smallest) is 75%. The editor shows the real size. |
| Offset | of |
subscript, normal, superscript |
Each color has its own on/off switch. An attribute that is off is left out of the file, and YouTube then uses the viewer’s own caption settings for it.
Positions
A position places a line: the anchor point (which corner or edge of the text box) is put at the horizontal and vertical percentage of the video. YouTube pulls every position in towards the center (value × 0.96 + 2 %), so 0% is really 2% and 100% is 98% — the editor shows where the line really ends up, and the preview draws that 2–98% area as a dashed frame.
Window Styles
- Justify — left, right or center for lines of different length.
- Text direction — left to right, right to left, vertical upright or vertical rotated, and the column order for vertical text.
- Window box opacity — YouTube can draw a second box behind the whole window. It is hidden by default, but viewers can turn it on by accident, so set it to 0 to keep it hidden.
Saving for Upload
YouTube’s upload and its apps have a few quirks. Subtitle Edit works around them when it saves (the same workarounds as YTSubConverter):
- An opacity of 255 is written as 254, and text color
#FFFFFFas#FEFEFE— otherwise the upload drops them and the viewer’s settings take over. - A line at 0 ms is written at 1 ms — the Android app ignores the position of lines at 0 ms.
- A zero-width space is added after the first
<s>of a line that has no other text — otherwise the upload removes that part’s pen. - Placeholder entries with id 0 are added, and ids are written in increasing order.
These are undone when the file is read back, so they never show up in the editor.
Converting
Converting to another format turns pens into <i>, <b>, <u> and <font color> tags and positions into {\an} tags. Converting from another format turns those tags into pens and positions when the file is saved.