Speaker 1: What's up guys, I'm Zia Maliki and this video is an ultimate guide to SRT files. You are going to learn how to create an SRT file manually from scratch or how to create them faster. Learn about the time codes, what are they for and exactly how you can use them to check them and upload them to your social media or YouTube channel. So we see subtitles every day whether it's on TV, Netflix or if we are browsing for social media videos such as YouTube and Instagram. How do we actually create these subtitles to put them on your own content on YouTube videos? So a file that contains subtitles is called an SRT file which stands for SubRef Subtitle. It's a plain text file that contains information about the duration and location of text that's displayed on screen. One of the most popular places where you can find SRT files online is on YouTube. Every time you click on that CC button which stands for Closed Caption, you are activating the SRT files link to that video. Now SRT files are there on the most social media platforms. And the great thing is that most social media platforms accept SRT files. This means you can create one SRT file and distribute it to all your media channels. This avoids you from having to create separate SRT files for each platform. So there is a variety of different ways that how you can actually make SRT files. I'm going to show you a simple and easy way from scratch. Now that you know what an SRT file is, how do you make one? First of all, you don't need to download a piece of software or application for this. Creating a SubRef Subtitle file from scratch is actually very easy to do. All you need to do is to have a text editor on your computer and create a text file. In that text file, you can start writing the subtitle you want for your video to appear on the screen. The only thing you need to keep in mind when creating your SRT file is that it accepts the following formats. Here is a quick example of the SRT file that I would need to have for a 10 second video. First of all, one subtitle is composed of three things. The number of that subtitle, the timecode for that subtitle, the actual text that will be displayed on screen. So as you can see here, the first subtitle that will be played on the screen is the section number 1. Then we have the beginning and ending timecode of when that subtitle is displayed on the screen. The timecode is consisted of nine digits. The first two being the hour, the second two being the minutes, the third two being the seconds and then the last three being the milliseconds. As you can see here, this subtitle which starts one second after the video begins and will end at six seconds and 500 milliseconds after the video started. And then during that timecode, the text that is displayed on the screen is the following. This is an example of how to create a subtitle or SRT file. During these six seconds, this will be the text displayed on the screen. Once the subtitle is over, the next subtitle comes in. As we can see now, we are on the second section. The timecode goes from six seconds and 800 milliseconds to nine seconds and 500 milliseconds. And the following text will be displayed. It's very easy to make an SRT file using a simple text editor like Notepad. So that's how an SRT file would look like and that's how you can write one from scratch. If you are creating one on your computer in a text editor, the only thing you have to do is, once you saved it, you should change the extension from .txt to .srt at the end of the file. Or you can directly save it as .srt by going to the File menu, clicking on Save As and then changing the extension to .srt. The most important part to this is just making sure the timestamps for each subtitle is formatted correctly. Just like this one, hours, minutes, seconds and milliseconds. I also want to mention that there can be a blank period between subtitles. If we take a look back at my graphic and we have a look at the first subtitle, we can see the first subtitle ends at six seconds and 500 milliseconds. This doesn't mean that the second subtitle has to start at that same time. We can have a one second gap between the first subtitle and the second subtitle, meaning that it can be blank periods. So just keep in mind that every subtitle needs a section number. It needs a beginning and ending timecode for that section and it needs to be formatted correctly and then it needs the text which is displayed for that subtitle. And once you have done that, just change the format from .txt to .srt on your computer. It's as easy as that. Now you know how to create an .srt file from scratch on your computer. Let's give it a try and make one right now. I'm going to open Notepad text editor. Now here goes my first section. Hi, this is Zia Maliki and I welcome you all to Information Technology and here goes my second section. I solve your problems with computer, internet and technology. Now I'm going to save this file. For that, let's go to the File menu and choose Save As. Give it a name, test.srt and click Save. Now you have your .srt file ready on your computer. How do you actually use them? Before uploading them to your social media, you might wanna check that they work properly. To do this, you can easily use a software that pretty much everyone has on their computer. It's called VLC Media Player. If you don't have it, you can download it from the internet. It's free. You want to right click on a video and choose Open with VLC. Once it's played in the VLC player, right click and choose Subtitle. Once you opened up your .srt file inside VLC player, it should now be playing along with your video. You should watch the whole video to double check and make sure that your .srt file is correctly displaying the subtitle at the correct timestamps. Once you have checked your subtitles, you can post them to your social media. Many social media sites such as YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter all allow their creators to input closed captions. And because a lot of social media platforms actually have their video content on auto play when you are scrolling through the feed, a lot of users actually watch the videos with the sound off. So when subtitles are on for that video, people are more likely to stick around and actually watch it even though the sound is off on their phones. And .srt files are actually great for SEO. When you upload .srt files to platforms such as Facebook or YouTube, they are indexed by Google, therefore showing up a lot more in searches. Also I have found that .srt files are amazing when it comes to YouTube content, due to the fact that Google owns YouTube. And Google will detect as long as keywords are in your .srt files, and help you rank on YouTube and even Google's first page. YouTube is the platform where .srt files have the most power because like I said, Google will recognize the long tail keywords and read keywords in your .srt files and help you rank big time. To upload these files on YouTube, it's pretty straight forward. Once you have uploaded a video, you just need to go to your creator's studio, then click subtitle and choose a video that you want to add subtitle to. Let's go and upload this subtitle file to a video on our channel. For this example, I am going to upload it to one of my small YouTuber support videos. Once uploaded, then we will save it. And that's how you can create an .srt file from scratch and upload it to your social media. If you have any questions, I would love to answer them down in the comment section below. If this video was helpful and you enjoyed it, please hit the like button. 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