The thumbnail image is a screenshot from a Youtube video, for a song. the lyrics in gold color are Youtube closed captions, they look cool and stylish right? This is common in videos of 4K scaled anime openings. Can I get these offline? I know I can download videos using yt-dlp, and include subtitles in the container using the --embed-subs flag, I think you can also download subtitle files in vtt extension, but VLC can’t read them I think.
I didn’t include a link cuz it might become a hustle for dbzer0, but since some are asking here you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXzoiiZo5LA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StLX4kITjWU
there were better ones (Kaguya-sama openings) but I can’t find them anymore on Youtube, stupid copyrights, thus my obsession of hoarding what I like
Update: @Majestic@lemmy.ml provided the solution,
1- download the subtitle file in vtt format using yt-dlp:
yt-dlp --skip-download --embed-subs https://youtu.be/5i3pX-2NLKk?si=waYB6Jv4d6gxsVuh
2- use Subtitle Edit’s batch converter tool to convert the vtt file into .ass format
3- now just import it on VLC while watching your downloaded video, the subtitles will appear in the same styling as on Youtube, additionally you can embed them to the video container using ffmpeg
Are these the web based captions? I didn’t know you could have those in 2 locations at the same time (top and bottom)… That’s neat. But it does make me think they’re baked into the video, in which case they’d always be included if you download them.
here is a video example, they’re not like hard subs, rather like soft subs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5i3pX-2NLKk&list=PLJrvLNDbcTd4uwprjTN5nwwPzRmHf116i&index=20
Open this and change caption language to Japanese: https://youtu.be/ddWJatRxfz8?si=V27JgaisYSRgmGKi
Wow, so there are color, location and timing options that can be coded into these.
Sounds like something the VLC maintainers should add support for.
Maybe check other players if they can display them correctly? Not sure if mpv can butt that’s what I’d try first.
tried MPV since I’m on ubuntu, yeah it displayed the subtitles when I imported them (after downloading as vtt files). certainly better than VLC, but the effects and colors and exact position are not there. I think the position might be easy to adjust, but the other things no idea.
Open the web subtitles in subtitleedit. Change format to ass (advanced substation alpha). Save and re-embed using mkvtoolnix.
Positioning of multiple lines works well with ass and VLC shouldn’t have an issue reading and displaying. Not sure if YouTube includes the positioning data in their subtitles though. You could recreate that in subtitle edit (free software btw, dk web domain I believe) but it would be a bit of an annoyance.
edit: Corrected domain name. Not German, but nikse is it as OP has suggested
Yes. It’s incredibly powerful but easy to use for a basic purpose like editing a line or converting formats.
Link us to one of these examples, it doesn’t seem that hard to get
I really want to know how to extract them as well. I paid for a movie on YouTube since it was available nowhere else and yt wouldn’t let me download it without DRM, so I just OBS’d the whole thing.
I had captions on, so they’re baked in. I really like captions, but it would be nice to have the option to turn them off.
