this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2024
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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Is it possible to keep youtube videos AND their stylish captions for myself offline? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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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: @[email protected] 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

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

update: a solution was provided and I edited the post

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Awesome! I'll check this out!!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

if they are not stylized you can download them as soft sub. you could download the movie too, all using yt-dlp, since you have access I think.
I mentioned how to download subtitles in my post

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

subtitleedit

this is the software ?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Yes. It’s incredibly powerful but easy to use for a basic purpose like editing a line or converting formats.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

update: It worked perfectly! I first tried some online converters but their produced .ass files didn't have even colors. but when I tried subtitle edit (on my brother's computer cuz I don't have Windows) the produced subtitles where exactly the same as in Youtube!

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Link us to one of these examples, it doesn't seem that hard to get

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Two ideas:

  1. Get the subtitles burned into the video. Hopefully this will preserve the styling but you'll loose the ability to disable or control the subtitles after the fact.
  2. Download the subtitles as a separate file and configure them to be displayed the same way after the fact. This means figuring out their colors yourself etc. Hopefully you can save those defaults to subtitle file, depending on the format. Most subtitle formats are plain text, so there might just be some metadata field you enter at the top.

All just speculation though. I don't actually know subtitle file formats etc.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (2 children)

doesn't burning subtitles mean rendering? i.e changing the quality in some sense ?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

More or less. Think of it like screen recording the YouTube video as its playing with the subtitles instead of downloading the video.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Also processing time, especially on weaker hardware or with bigger files.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

actually it is not just color, there are other effects too like fading and exploding I see sometimes, for example each word gets highlighted or enlarged when the singer spells it like here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StLX4kITjWU

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

If those aren't burned I to the video, ie you can turn them off, then they must be some magical subtitle format that I'm not aware of.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

well, you can turn them off so they're not burned into video. the format is .vtt I think,
I linked a video

[–] [email protected] 22 points 3 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Open this and change caption language to Japanese: https://youtu.be/ddWJatRxfz8?si=V27JgaisYSRgmGKi

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

VLC does support it, if the subtitles are in .ASS format

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 months ago

Woah, that's pretty cool. I didn't know YouTube supported this type of format for the closed captions.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Maybe check other players if they can display them correctly? Not sure if mpv can butt that's what I'd try first.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago

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.