Hacker News Reader

Comment by alwayslikethis | Hacker News Reader

I predicted this moment when they switched to opensubtitles.com domain. Realistically though, their importance has diminished noticeably with tools like Whisper.

View on HN

Subtitles aren't the same as transcriptions. Transcriptions are literal, subtitles are not. Subtitles have many accessibility rules, like how many words are allowed, how much time should be between successive lines, timestamps should match exactly when the characters starts speaking, etc.

If you mean OpenAI's Whisper, has anyone created an actual product that people can use with downloaded videos?

Well. I don't know, but in my experience it shouldn't be too hard. The most difficult part would be timestamps I guess.

The Whisper API provides timestamped subtitle files, so that's a non issue, all you have to do is extract the audio, split and upload

I've made this little wrapper to do all that locally. `makesub video.mp4` will split the stream and create video.en.srt locally via whisper.cpp

https://github.com/mcdallas/whispersub

whisper.cpp runs locally and can output .srt, I’ve been using it a lot (takes a while though)

There’s even a version of whisper.cpp that compiles to wasm.

Really quite amazing

Bazaar supports using Whisper as a provider. I don't know how well it works.

https://wiki.bazarr.media/Additional-Configuration/Whisper-P...

I use MacWhisper to transcribe and summarize YouTube videos. Works great.

https://goodsnooze.gumroad.com/l/macwhisper

Absolutely. Bazaar [0] can download subtitles from tons of sites, and if they're not available, it can use Whisper [1] to generate the subtitles.

[0] https://www.bazarr.media

[1] https://wiki.bazarr.media/Additional-Configuration/Whisper-P...

I've used https://github.com/tomchang25/whisper-auto-transcribe to convert from Dutch to English on my win11 box with some success.

It's not perfect, and it'll completely lose some dialogue, but it's let us enjoy shows that we couldn't before.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com