WebVTT caption transcription app

Web application Open Materials
2021 research and teaching applications, web application, R
Code DOI GitHub repository Web application

Abstract

This open-source, R-based web application converts video captions (subtitles) from the Web Video Text Tracks (WebVTT) Format into plain text. Users upload a WebVTT file with the extension .vtt or .txt, and the application automatically removes metadata such as timestamps and formats the text.

How It Works

The diagram below outlines how the application turns a caption file into a plain-text document.

graph TD A["User uploads WebVTT file
(vtt or txt)"] --> B["Regular expressions remove
metadata such as timestamps"] B --> C["Text formatted
into a paragraph"] C --> D["Result displayed
on the website"] D --> E["Download as docx
or txt document"]

The application accepts caption files in the Web Video Text Tracks (WebVTT) Format with the extension .vtt or .txt, such as this example or this one.

Download VTT file

Once a caption file is uploaded, the application removes metadata such as timestamps and formats the text into a paragraph. The result is displayed on the page and can be downloaded as a .docx or .txt document. In this way, the application makes the content of video captions more accessible. The uploaded data are available only to the user and are deleted when the page is closed.

 Web Application

The application can be used below or opened in a separate window.

Programming Details

The source code is available on GitHub under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence, and the app can be extended through pull requests. The code is also archived on Zenodo (Bernabeu, 2024). Questions and suggestions can be submitted as issues or emailed to .

The core of the application is the index.Rmd script, which processes the VTT file with regular expressions.

To produce .docx documents, that script renders the one below, which in turn applies the format of this Word template.

References

Bernabeu, P. (2024). VTT-Transcription-App (Version 0.2) [Computer software]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10674606

subtitles accessibility transcription webvtt web video text tracks format web application data science regular expressions stringr R R Shiny Flexdashboard software

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