Show HN: Add video subtitles on the fly from plain text | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Add video subtitles on the fly from plain text

011.video

53 points011-video16 comments

About two years UC Berkeley was forced to take down most of their university lecture videos which were available freely and publicly due to some regulation around closed captioning availability. Presumably the cost to providing the closed captioning was considered too high. I wonder if some software and/or service provider could help get those videos back up.

I just went back to some of my Berkeley course captures and the few that I checked out had captions that looked human-generated (unless YouTube's auto-generation can handle math terminology and abbreviations fine). It's a shame that they can't release those ones publicly due to some weird legal reasons.

IIRC the regulation was meant in good spirit (to ensure the hard-of-hearing had equal access to university produced artifacts), but effectively it caused a lot of loss.

The article's actual title uses the word "burn", not "add", which makes more sense. "Add video subtitles on the fly from plain text" is basically just a description of subtitles as they work today.

well, minus the on the fly part, i guess. I thought it might be semi automatic by trying to skip actually understanding spoken words but counting syllables or similar to detect accurate timing. I don't know what the workflow usually looks like for this kind of task but this one presented here doesn't look too dumb to me. even without burning them into the video.

> I thought it might be semi automatic by trying to skip actually understanding spoken words but counting syllables or similar to detect accurate timing.

Is there a software that can do that? I have been searching for one, but haven't found any so far?

what part of "2. UPLOAD A VIDEO FROM YOUR DEVICE" is on the fly?

Thanks for the comments !

I try to answer to all together :

- "I thought it might be semi-automatic..." : 011.video is made modestly with HI (Human Intelligence) not AI. We have all used Youtube automatic translation to know how ineffective is it. By the way 011.video support a "Speech to sticker" feature on chromium browser (except on Edge). It's fun to add video/GIF/images on the fly, but it's not 100% effective as it depends on Google speech recognition system, your internet connection, your mic, your device...

- "...option to generate a separate WebVTT subtitle file..." : Each SRT files or WebVTT files is linked to a video. As i said today AI automatic speech to text translation is far from effective. So if you want a clean webTTT file you have to make it manually phrase by phrase.

- "got the width of a smartphone, line are wrapped..." : 011.video smartphone / android app is not up to date. i will update it later this month after getting some feedback from the Desktop version online.

I’m eager to receive more feedback.

Is there an option to generate a separate subtitle file in a standardized format (e.g. WebVTT) without modifying the base video?

Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebVTT

i think the Matroska container format (mkv) can do things like that. I remember reading that you could store video/audio content in separate files without player configuration. No idea how well that's supported though.

Update: Sorry, but i just realized you were more likely to ask about what this software can do and not how to link external subtitle files to your video.

How-to add permanent subtitles guide : https://011.video/2020/08/03/burn-video-subtitles-on-the-fly... 011.video web app : https://011.video/desktop.html

>UPLOAD A VIDEO

lol no, why would I upload my movies to someone elses computer when ffmpeg and mencoder exist?

Painful site design, at least change the background. You're not doing yourself any favors with that repeating geometric background. Having your bold text as the same color as the non geometric portion of the background doesn't help either. I hope your burned in subtitles don't make use of the same design principles of anti-contrast and signal hidden in noise.

This critique seems needlessly harsh and a bit offtopic to me.

I like it, text is not hard to read and the background and interesting design choices have more personality than most cookie cutter designs. You gotta appreciate the variety and spice of life.

Also, it looks like it got the width of a smartphone, line are wrapped when i got a 24" monitor, i hate it.

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