Downloading youtube closed captions as video subtitles

[joshtriplett]

I recently discovered gcap, which can download youtube closed captions as a .srt subtitle. I'd love to see that functionality integrated into youtube-dl.

[rifter]

gcap seems not to work anymore, or at least it is not working for me. I think it is getting the same parsing problems some other youtube interface software had.
It would be nice if there was some way to get youtube-dl to get the captions because there are some videos I want that have captions and are kind of useless without them.

[phihag]

youtube's subtitles format doesn't seem to complicated. Unfortunately, gcap is GPL-licensed, so we can't translate their source code from Perl to Python.

[rbrito]

I'm not really sure that the (re)implementation of what gcap does needs to be a clean-room implementation to avoid problems with license differences. Does it?

I am motivated to look at their implementation and see what we can do to support those, perhaps in an extra information extractor... I don't know what command line option to assign to it, though. :)

Regards.

[Ergzay]

I also would love to see this feature. I often look at Japanese videos and ripping the Japanese videos without their subtitles makes the videos unable to be shown to anyone else, which I do quite often. (I can understand Japanese to some extent.)

[rbrito]

On Oct 25 2011, Ergzay wrote:

I also would love to see this feature.

As soon as @phihag commits the fixes to get Facebook videos working again I
will try to start working on this and see what I can come up with. :)

No promises, besides the fact that I will try to get this to work (as I am
also interested in this feature).

[ghost]

I needed the subtitles for some videos so I have wrotten a small python class addressing this
I you like it you are free to use it in any way desired, check it out:
https://github.com/lasupermarmota/getyoutubecc

[phihag]

@lasupermarmota Just to clarify: Are you putting that project into the public domain? If so, we'd be happy to integrate the code into youtube-dl.

[ghost]

Yes, you are free to use it modified and do whatever you like with the code.
Anyway I don't promise anything but if you need some mod or adaption and it
doesn't take so much time, you can tell me i can try to implement

2011/10/27 Philipp Hagemeister <
[email protected]>

@lasupermarmota Just to clarify: Are you putting that project into the
public domain? If so, we'd be happy to integrate the code into youtube-dl.

Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub:
#90 (comment)

[rbrito]

@lasupermarmota: Excellent!

[nirbheek]

I'd really love to see this in youtube-dl, is there any progress on this? Thanks!

[nirbheek]

Well, I got tired of waiting, so I wrote a downloader + parser for you guys. This one converts youtube annotations to ASS format, with proper font colour, embarrassing bgcolour interpretation, and hacky text positioning.

https://github.com/nirbheek/youtube-ass

I'm a bit low on bandwidth, so I only tested it with this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Pt0f7j2kS0

[macedd]

How to use it @nirbheek?
Which solutions are you guys using with youtube-dl? Wish to find out some shell stuff to get a better experience...

[FiloSottile]

I'm on it. I hope to have it ready to get merged in a couple of days.
I have a question for a project manager: I already have an open pull request, what should I do? Go on on that master of my fork? Create a new branch aligned with my fork? Create a new branch aligned with your master?

[rbrito]

Hi @ThiagoF, @nirbheek and others.

On Mar 11 2012, thiagof wrote:

Which solutions are you guys using with youtube-dl? Wish to find out some
shell stuff to get a better experience...

An "emergency solution" would be to use gcap while this is not yet merged.

That being said, this week (probably Wed or so) I am planning on releasing a
new version of TunesViewer (a downloader for iTunes U) and, if nobody beats
me to it, I will be working on this support of closed captions to
youtube-dl.

Regards,

Rogério Brito : rbrito@{ime.usp.br,gmail.com} : GPG key 4096R/BCFCAAAA
http://rb.doesntexist.org/blog : Projects : https://github.com/rbrito/
DebianQA: http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=rbrito%40ime.usp.br

[phihag]

@FiloSottile Feel free to create a new branch and ask a pull request from there.

[phihag]

This should work now with Filipo's excellent contribution, --write-srt.

[nirbheek]

Hmmm. Sorry, but this implementation is quite sub-optimal. I chose ASS instead of SRT specifically because SRTs cause a loss of information.

In youtube annotations, you can have multiple captions in various places on the screen (often pointing at specific things), and they have colour information, and can also move with time.

[joshtriplett]

@nirbheek From what I can tell, the bits that got merged cover youtube closed captions, which seems somewhat orthogonal to your work on annotations. Also, I don't think youtube closed captions support any of the features you describe, so most subtitle formats can represent them without loss of information.

I'd still love to see your annotation support merged as well, and with both present, it would make sense to download them into a single subtitle file and format to make it easy for a player to display both.

[joshtriplett]

@nirbheek Might I suggest opening a separate pull request for your annotation support, ideally including support for downloading and converting captions, annotations, or both?

[nirbheek]

@joshtriplett ah I see what you mean. Sorry about the confusion. :)

Should I open a new issue for that or is there one already open? Thanks!

[nirbheek]

I haven't had the time to work on a pull request yet, I'll try to find some this week or the next.

[macedd]

Awesome! great job

[kenorb]

WARNING: video has no closed captions.

How we can we ignore the warning? Why we need to exit the whole app in case of missing subtitles?
I've hundreds videos to download and some of has them has subtitles, some of them not.

[jaimeMF]

@nirbheek Open a new issue for that with a link to the video/playlist that fails and with the output when running youtube-dl with the --verbose option, please.

[MaddTheSane]

Is it possible to implement embedded closed-captions in mp4 files? Another thing: should the annotations and closed captions/subtitles be handled differently?

[jaimeMF]

@MaddTheSane open new issues for the requests

[kakila]

This line

youtube-dl --write-srt --srt-lang es http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6p5AZp7r_Q

doesn't download the spanish subtitles though the video has them. Any ideas why?

[ghost]

Try to download es-ES

pulpe@tardis:~$ youtube-dl --list-subs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6p5AZp7r_Q
[youtube] Setting language
[youtube] X6p5AZp7r_Q: Downloading video webpage
[youtube] X6p5AZp7r_Q: Downloading video info webpage
[youtube] X6p5AZp7r_Q: Extracting video information
[youtube] X6p5AZp7r_Q: Checking available subtitles
[youtube] X6p5AZp7r_Q: Available subtitles for video: fr,en,tr,de,ko,da,pt-BR,es-ES

[kakila]

Thank you very much! that was really useful. Sorry for n00b.

[coolpra]

I was also searching this and I found a great solution....you can download the video + subtitle language you want as well...

check the following link.... **[Edit by @phihag: Removed link to closed-source software]

[phihag]

@coolpra This is an issue tracker for youtube-dl, a software which does allow you to download subtitles. Please refrain from linking to irrelevant software and discussing non-youtube-dl related topics here.

[95mobi]

Edited by @phihag: Snip spam.