The world of Timed Text is esoteric, detailed, full of annoying abbreviations, and full of wildly differing opinions. I’ll be giving mine! But also, describing the current state of the most common formats, and some practical and usable advice about which format to adopt for which purpose, and where things are heading in the standards world. If time allows, I will attempt to bring some humour to the topic, as well as a select few nuggets of technical complexity to keep the audience away from their IDE for at least a few minutes. This talk was presented at Demuxed 2025 in London, a conference by and for engineers working in video. Every year we host a conference with lots of great new talks like this – learn more at https://demuxed.com