Transcripts and captions coming to Stream on SharePoint

RussHerald we really appreciate you taking the time to post your questions in this forum.  I'll try to shed more light on your first question regarding transcripts and their relationship to the actual video file.

In short: downloading a video file containing transcripts will not download the transcript, in other words playing the .mp4 file won't render any captions.  The reasoning behind this is that transcripts—along with other Stream artifacts like chapters, custom thumbnail, or comments—don't get written in the video file's metadata.  Specific technology was built so that Stream videos can contain these artifacts exclusively within SharePoint itself, think of it as SharePoint-only metadata.  Outside the Stream experience, these artifacts are not carried over on the video file.

That being said, the actual transcript file can be downloaded agnostic of the video being downloaded.  That way, you can download the video .mp4 file and the video's .vtt caption file and use them as you see fit. 

Please let me know if you have any additional questions or would like to dive further into this topic. 

Thanks again for contributing to this forum!