Summary

Please add first-class support for .vtt / WebVTT subtitle files.

Why this would help

MarkItDown is already useful as a bridge from many document/media formats into Markdown for LLM workflows. WebVTT is a common interchange format for:

• meeting transcripts
• video subtitles/captions
• downloaded YouTube or conference transcripts
• course/video note pipelines

Right now, .vtt does not appear to be explicitly supported. It may sometimes fall through as generic text depending on MIME/charset detection, but that is fragile and does not produce a clean Markdown result.

Expected behavior

Given a .vtt file, MarkItDown should parse it intentionally and produce readable Markdown instead of raw subtitle syntax.

For example, it should handle:

• WEBVTT header
• cue timestamps (00:00:01.000 --> 00:00:03.000)
• cue identifiers
• multiline subtitle blocks
• optional speaker prefixes / metadata when present

Possible output shapes

Any of these would be better than raw passthrough:

1. Clean transcript mode

   • strips timestamps/cue metadata
   • preserves text paragraphs

2. Timestamp-preserving markdown mode

   • keeps timestamps in a readable markdown form, e.g.
     • [00:01] Speaker: text...

3. Metadata-aware transcript

   • preserves speaker labels when present
   • drops formatting noise

Why this seems aligned with MarkItDown

MarkItDown already supports text-oriented and transcription-oriented inputs (including audio transcription and YouTube transcript workflows). WebVTT feels like a natural input format for the same family of use cases.

Minimal ask

Even a first step would be great:

• explicitly recognize .vtt / text/vtt
• convert it through a dedicated parser or lightweight cleaner
• output readable Markdown/text content rather than raw subtitle markup

Thanks — this would make MarkItDown much more useful in note-taking / transcript-to-markdown pipelines.