The Subrip subtitle format takes its origin from the program of the same name. Subrip is a program to rip and convert DVD subtitles in a text format through an OCR process.
As it's a text based format, you can open and edit it, not only with VSS, but with any text editor.

Here is a sample of the format:

1
00:00:12,000 --> 00:00:15,123
This is the first subtitle

2
00:00:16,000 --> 00:00:18,000
Another subtitle demonstrating tags:
<b>bold</b>, <i>italic</i>, <u>underlined</u>
<font color="#ff0000">red text</font>

3
00:00:20,000 --> 00:00:22,000  X1:40 X2:600 Y1:20 Y2:50
Another subtitle demonstrating position.

We have 3 subtitles defined above. Each subtitle definition has 3 part:

• First line is the subtitle index, it's just a sequential number.
• Second line is the start and stop time, it can optionally include subtitle coordinates in pixels as a bounding box (X1:left X2:right Y1:top Y2:bottom).
• The third line is the subtitle text (one or more lines, with optional tags)

Each subtitle is separated by a blank line.

The start and stop time have this format: HH:MM:SS,MIL (hours, minutes, seconds, milliseconds)

The available official tags are:

• <b></b> : bold
• <i></i> : italic
• <u></u> : underline
• <font color=”#rrggbb”></font> : text color using 3 color components, red, green and blue.

Note that VisualSubsync doesn't support subtitle coordinates.