VLC displays time instead of text

Question

I have an issue with VLC when I try to add subtitles.

This displays to me instead of proper text from *.SRT subtitle format.

Solution 1

I had the same issue and in my case the problem was that in the subtitle file the time was given in the format 00:00:02:160 --> 00:00:05:760 while it should actually be like 00:00:02,160 --> 00:00:05,760.

Solution 2

Check your .srt file. Looks like you have "->" between your time segments where there should be "-->" instead (ideally with space characters on either side). The "replace" function of your text editor should make short work of fixing the issue if this is the case - worked for me.

Comments

[Robert W]

I used John's answer to fix the first problem but then the subs disappeared all together. Turns out there was a space after each ':' and removing them fixed the problem

[Vincent Oostelbos]

This is the issue in my case. Any suggestions as to how to fix this? The replace function is tricky, as there are other colons which should not be replaced; and it does not seem doable to replace all of "00:00:00:" to "00:00:00,", "00:00:01:" to "00:00:01,", etc. Is there some way using regular expressions?