Forum Discussion
Matt Cannady
May 03, 2018Copper Contributor
How to get custom vtt subtitle or caption file to show up in the transcript window and be searchable
Marc Mroz, We've been looking at using Stream for internal technical videos and were also disappointed with the auto-transcription. We now have a hand crafted transcription file to use with our video...
- May 04, 2018
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.
Marc Mroz
Microsoft
Dec 06, 2018@Thomas Maier @Matt Cannady @Marc Mroz I have tested it. The transcript option is only displayed when the captions language is set to English or Spanish. If you have manually uploaded your own vtt captions file and set the captions language to German for example, the transcript option is not displayed. I think in the software is a simple if statement present (if (captions language == English or Spanish) {DisplayTranscript();}) that should be changed to "if ((captions is autogenerated and captions language == English or Spanish) or (captions is manually uploaded no language check required!)) { DisplayTranscript(); }" (sorry for this unnice programming language :-)).
Asmita Kulkarni (RADIANT) - Can you take a look at this issue? We don't show the transcript window unless the caption is listed as English or Spanish.
Asmita Kulkarni (RADIANT)
Microsoft
Mar 20, 2019Yes, we are looking into this to help improve the current experience. Please @ me if there are further questions that I can help answer.