In April 2018, while preparing lecture recordings for a course our instructional designer had to download captions from our YouTube channel and modify them in a program called 'Screen Cast-O-Matic' which was used by our university at the time. YouTube provided the captions in 'SBV' format while the SCOM only supported 'SRT'. The instructional designer told me she had been manually editing captions from SBV format to SRT using a text editor because she couldn't find any converter that required less work than that.
Here is an example of SBV and SRT captions:
0:00:01.000,0:00:04.000
This is the first line of the caption.
0:00:04.500,0:00:07.000
This is the second line.
0:00:07.500,0:00:10.000
Welcome to the demo!
1
00:00:01,000 --> 00:00:04,000
This is the first line of the caption.
2
00:00:04,500 --> 00:00:07,000
This is the second line.
3
00:00:07,500 --> 00:00:10,000
Welcome to the demo!
Having recently learned regular expressions, I thought this would be a perfect use case for that. However, our ID mentioned she didn't want any solution that was any more complex or required 'many extra clicks'. So, I decided to write the converter in JavaScript and hosted it on our university's free static web hosting (public.asu.edu). The tool allowed her to select or drag-and-drop their SBV file, and without any additional clicks, it would download the converted SRT captions. The ID used it for her current project, and then neither of us touched it again.
Then 3 years later I received a delightful email from nas.edu telling me how they found the tool useful and thanked me for creating it. My curiosity was piqued on how they discovered the tool as it was on a relatively obscure link with no sitemap. I googled 'sbv to srt' and behold, the first result was my tool. I got curious and added privacy friendly analytics to see how many people were using the tool. To my surprise, it was being used by ~3.5k people per month. The fact that it was hosted on an .edu domain most likely improved its search engine ranking and possibly the trust worthiness.
I added my contact email address to the footer of the website and received messages of gratitude from some of the most diverse and interesting people. People loved the simplicity and the fact that there no ads or distractions. Although infrequent, each email always made my day. Some of my favorite places from outside the US where I received emails from include:
- Greek Orthodox Community of Melbourne and Victoria, Australia
- Glasgow City Council (public museums and art galleries), Scotland
- An expedition yacht, France
- Rauhankasvatusinstituutti, Finland
For a brief moment, it reminded me of what the internet promised to be, fostering collaboration and connecting people worldwide.
Unfortunately, in February 2025, our university imposed a new policy without notice to block all unauthenticated users from accessing personal websites managed by university affiliates. This killed the traffic immediately and I haven't heard from anyone since. The new policy did motivate me to setup this website and save the tool for posterity.
Modern LLMs can create superior tools within seconds so no big loss. However, I'll truly miss the occasional email in my inbox from somewhere around the world.