You are working with durations, not dates. PHP's date and time functions aren't really of any help here. You should parse the string yourself to get a fully numeric duration:
$time = '00:02:14.31';
sscanf($time, '%d:%d:%d.%d', $hours, $minutes, $seconds, $centiseconds);
$total = $centiseconds
+ $seconds * 100
+ $minutes * 60 * 100
+ $hours * 60 * 60 * 100;
var_dump($total);
The total is in centiseconds (100th of a second, the scale of your original input). Multiply/divide by other factors to get in others scales, as needed.