SRT is the friendliest subtitle format ever designed — plain text, four fields per cue — and yet badly-timed SRTs are everywhere. The rules that fix 95% of them fit on one screen.
Rule 1: Lead with the cut, not the sentence. A cue should land on the shot change or the first audible syllable, whichever the eye meets first. Cues that float 300 ms late read as lag even when the audio sync is perfect.
Rule 2: Two lines, ~42 characters, 17–20 chars/second. Reading speed is the physics of subtitles. A cue that needs three lines or a 25 cps sprint loses viewers at the second line; split it instead. Minimum duration ~1 second, maximum ~6–7 — beyond that, re-readers appear.
Rule 3: Gap between cues. A 2-frame gap (≈80 ms) between consecutive cues lets the eye register the change; wall-to-wall cues blur into one endless subtitle.
Rule 4: Timestamps are HH:MM:SS,mmm --> HH:MM:SS,mmm — the comma before milliseconds is the hill SRT parsers die on. Export tools that write a dot instead break half the players on earth. (Yes, really.)
Rule 5: Verify on the worst player you ship to. Smart TVs and old Android players disagree about line breaks and positioning; test the minimum, not the average.
Our in-browser generator (https://toolfyra.com/video-subtitle-generator.html) builds spec-correct SRT with these rules baked in — timing, gaps, comma format — and exports locally, so transcript drafts never leave your machine. For the surrounding pipeline, the video tools index lives at https://toolfyra.com/sitemap.xml.
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