Which format is best for reading and quoting?
Clean TXT is the words alone, one flowing text — best for reading straight through, pasting into documents, or word-counting. Note that auto-generated captions carry no punctuation, so clean text from a long ASR track reads as one continuous paragraph; creator-written captions read normally. Timestamped TXT puts [MM:SS] at each line — best when you need to cite the moment something was said. Both-in-one stacks the clean text first, then the timestamped copy in the same file, so you never wish you'd picked the other one.
Which format is best for subtitles?
SRT is the lingua franca of subtitle files — numbered cues with millisecond ranges. Video editors (Premiere, Resolve, CapCut), media players, and translation tools all accept it. VTT is its web-native sibling: the format HTML5 video and most web players expect. Rule of thumb: editing software → SRT; embedding on a website → VTT. Both are always timestamped by nature.
Which format is best for notes?
A heading plus timestamped bullets, rendering natively in Obsidian, Notion, and Logseq. If the destination is a knowledge base rather than a video editor, this is the one — full guide here.
Which format is best for code?
Each line as data — { "start": 0, "end": 4.2, "text": "…" } with video and track metadata attached. For scripts, RAG pipelines, and anything that would otherwise have to parse SRT syntax with a regex — full guide here.
What if you can’t decide?
The default (TXT, both-in-one) is right for most people: readable now, citable later, one file. And because every format is generated from the same cached captions, requesting the same video in another format later is instant — no choice here is permanent.
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