Forum Discussion
How to get custom vtt subtitle or caption file to show up in the transcript window and be searchable
Ok... I finally figured out what was going on after lots of trial/error and closer looking at the problematic VTT files.
It turns out Stream will not parse the VTT file uploaded in the caption section and turn it into the transcript if there is a line in the file that has no elapsed duration/gap between the time codes. For example like this:
00:16:24.490 --> 00:16:24.490 keep falling apart.
If you change the time codes so there is a time gap between them, it works fine. Like this:
00:16:24.490 --> 00:16:24.491 keep falling apart.
So for the example VTT file you sent, there is actually 2 lines in the file where there is no gap in the time codes. I updated these 4 lines in your file to ensure there is gap and the subsequent line also starts at the new time. Once I did that your custom VTT file works correctly and shows up as the transcript. (See the attached file below that is the fixed VTT, to try yourself.)
00:16:24.490 --> 00:16:24.491 keep falling apart. 00:16:24.491 --> 00:16:26.890 THE WITNESS: 417? 00:41:07.740 --> 00:41:07.741 read it. 00:41:07.741 --> 00:41:21.720 (Requested portion of record read.)
I'll file a bug on our side in Stream to fix this issue so that our parsing logic still works even if there are lines in the VTT with the beginning/ending time codes the same. I don't know how easy/hard this will be to fix on our side.
I'm encouraged to know that this should work. I've followed these directions and still don't have the option to turn on the transcription panel for this video and caption. Again, if I let it auto-generate the captions I do have the option. My thought is that either I am missing another setting somewhere, it's not working as it should, or there may be some admin setting my IT department needs to change?
MicrosoftMatt Cannady - I think I might have reproduced the issue, but I need to try a few more things. Can you give me the exact flow you did? What video language did you pick when it was uploaded? Did you have the autogenerate caption file checked at upload? When did you upload the VTT File?
I think there might be an issue if you don't let it autogenerate the caption file on it's own that when you upload the custom caption file it doesn't think it can have a transcript. I'm still testing a few thing though to see if I can narrow down when this happens.