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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...
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
MicrosoftMatt Cannady - Your user has an E5 license? Only E5 or Stream Plan 2 users will see the transcript on the side of the video when one is available?
If you upload another video and you say the video language is English and have the "autogenerate captions file" after waiting a while for the transcript to generate, when you go to the player page do you see the transcript window on the right side of the video?
If you do see the transcript it means you are E5 or Stream Plan 2. I'm not sure why when you upload your own VTT as a caption file it doesn't show the transcript window. It does for me when I test this. If the above works for you, then maybe there is something wrong on our side or there is some corner case bug. If you open up a support ticket we can get someone looking at it, if support can't figure it out they'll escalate it up to us in the product group for deeper investigation.
Marc Mroz - I'm trying to find out my license level now. I do see the transcript when I auto-generate captions but not when I upload my own.
As to your second paragraph, that is correct.
How do I open a support ticket to you?
