Commons talk:Timed Text

Ogg Kate

Why isn't Ogg Kate discussed? VolodyA! V Anarhist Beta_M (converse) 18:15, 10 March 2012 (UTC)

How to give timecodes??

Ok, I give up. I read about the new video support and thought I'd give it a go - but cannot find a way that isn't totally manual for getting the timecodes to match the text to the video. I just transcribed this video File:ABC ATMs.ogv here [1]. I manually made the first line's worth of timecoding but I cannot see the "unversal subtitles editor" anywhere. How do I create the timecodes? Wittylama (talk) 02:40, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

Where did you find talk of this "unversal subtitles editor"? I have been doing the timecodes manually since 2009, and all I've seen is the manual edit method, and links to subtitling programs that I've never tried. Anyway, I completed the timecodes for File:ABC ATMs.ogv (see history) and they seem to work in both Opera logged in and Firefox not logged in. I was experiencing severe lags, pauses and restarts with other timed text files so I used yours as a test. -84user (talk) 16:01, 1 February 2013 (UTC)

Three big problems with the subtitles on Commons

I am trying to subtitle some clips of artists in the Eurovision Song Contest 2013 presenting themselves, and I've found some problems. I write the subtitles in the online tool Amara, and there I manage to sync the text to the clip. Then I copy the SRT-text to the subtitles page on Commons.

• Problem one: The text is not synced to the video when looking at the result on Commons. I have also tried looking at the timecode in my video editing software, and it is not at all similar to the timecode in the same clip uploaded to Commons. I have to manually adjust the text, save, watch, adjust it some more, save, watch over and over again, and that brings us to:
• Problem two: The "Show preview" function is not available on the subtitles pages. Therefore there are a lot of edits on my subtitles pages. That's annoying.
• Problem three: When manually adjusting the text I've noticed there is too much time difference between 00,999 and 01,000. Why is that? In many of my videos I've noticed a line of text is shown too early if I set the time to 01,999, but it's shown too late if I set the time to 02,000. How is that possible?

-abbedabb^disk 15:06, 10 June 2013 (UTC)

There seems to be an problem with the kultura html 5 player. Maybe you could file a bug on bugzilla:? --McZusatz (talk) 17:35, 10 June 2013 (UTC)

Hmm... Maybe. It's so complicated. But I'll try. -abbedabb^disk 17:59, 10 June 2013 (UTC)

Please post the link to the bug report here. Let me know if you have problems, otherwise. --McZusatz (talk) 18:31, 10 June 2013 (UTC)

Here they are:

Problem one: Bug 49406 - Text sync varies between Commons and other players

Problem two: Bug 49408 - Huge difference between 00,999 and 01,000 in TimedText

Problem three: Bug 49409 - No video on previewing TimedText changes

-abbedabb^disk 20:39, 10 June 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the links and the bug reports. --McZusatz (talk) 21:15, 10 June 2013 (UTC)

Redirect

My test of a #REDIRECT on TimedText:Wikipedia_Edit2014.ogv.en.srt failed miserably, but as I'm on GPRS bandwidth at the moment this is no conclusive observation (image annotations and other AJAX tricks also fail until they somehow make it into the browser cache after many manual reloads.) –Be..anyone (talk) 09:52, 4 January 2015 (UTC)

Be..anyone I fail to understand what you were attempting, and also I have limited understanding of how things were supposed to work. What were you doing, what did you think would happen, and what happened? Blue Rasberry (talk) 21:32, 5 January 2015 (UTC)

Hmmm, I see problems with Wikimedia's mobile version but not this particular problem. I am reinstating be..anyone's redirect attempt and test myself for a few minutes. -84user (talk) 02:39, 6 January 2015 (UTC) UPDATE redirect works in Firefox Windows 8, no plugins, just javascript, network limited to 100 Kbits per second, HTML5 player runs, CC button gives list of all language timed texts. -84user (talk) 02:45, 6 January 2015 (UTC) When I switch video file format from webm 480 to Ogg 480 or Ogg 160, the CC button no longer has any effect, and also when returning back to Webm 480 - no subtitles! Subtitle functionality only returned when I clicked Menu and chose another HTML5 web player from the list. I'll continue but with network speed of 500 Kbit/second as 100 is nigh on unusable even with the low bandwidth Ogg 160 format.-84user (talk) 02:58, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

Final update: Well, there are definitely user interface problems with the player on wikimedia, but I do not think it's the redirect because the same issuess present with the target timed text file. I suggest others test various combinations of player control pushes to see the problems, but it's too frustrating for me to continue - each time I changed the HTML5 player the current video continued playing unpauseable and unseekable until closing the whole browser tab, the download control is clunky and only save link as works and only downloads to an index.php file. -84user (talk) 03:33, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

@Bluerasberry: , I tested (and reverted after an apparent FAIL outcome) a redirect instead of a stupid copy in the TimedText namespace. Apparently 84user found that the redirect actually works as designed/documented, thanks. –Be..anyone (talk) 08:24, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

Should there not be more varieties of the English language be added to the dropdown menu of the toolbar of the Wikimedia HTML5 media player?

Currently, in the drop down menu, when clicking the button in the toolbar of the Wikimedia HTML5 media player, you can create subtitles for the video in the following variants of the English language:

• en English
• en-ca Canadian English
• en-gb British English

I wonder if not more variants should be added, for example:

• en-us American English

Kind regards, (Vincent Mia Edie Verheyen (talk) 03:46, 2 November 2017 (UTC))

Translation

I started translating from english to french the subtitles of this video, but after creating the new page, I can't edit it anymore to keep on translating. Would someone have a solution to this problem? Djiboun (talk) 22:09, 24 January 2018 (UTC)

@Djiboun: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=TimedText:Knowledge_Belongs_to_All_of_Us_V9.0.2_(FINAL_CUT).webm.fr.srt&action=edit? —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 01:53, 25 January 2018 (UTC)

Thank you @Koavf: for the link. It works perfectly! Djiboun (talk) 22:49, 25 January 2018 (UTC)

Multi-line Timed Text broken?

Currently for multi-line subtitles only the first line of text is shown, leading to truncated subtitles. Multi-line subtitles are no longer understandable.

Previously, multi-line subtitles worked correctly.

• Something changed?
• New specifications?
• A bug on the server software?
• A problem with my own player?

Example:

• https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/TimedText:Wikipedia_-_FactsMatter2016.webm.en.srt

Previously the following worked.

2
00:00:02,210 --> 00:00:05,710
We are not
in a post-fact world.

Subtitles on multiple lines were collapsed into 1 single line.

Now only "We are not" is shown. "in a post-fact world." is silently dropped.

It appears that currently it must be encoded like (all text on 1 line)

2
00:00:02,210 --> 00:00:05,710
We are not in a post-fact world.

This would not be a problem for new translations, where we can pay attention only to write one single line of text, but I cannot imagine we need to recode all existing subtitle files? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Geertivp (talk • contribs) 10:53, 9 November 2018 (UTC)

Created https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T209247 ticket. Geertivp (talk) 21:34, 11 November 2018 (UTC)

duplicate langcodes

zh-min-nan and zh-yue are dupes of nan and yue. Perhaps they exist because of phab:T10217. I think it is best to disable the dupes.--Roy17 (talk) 21:57, 18 January 2019 (UTC)

Multi line subtitles seems working as for now?

@4nn1l2: — Preceding unsigned comment added by Tomskyhaha (talk • contribs) 04:42, 17 May 2019‎ (UTC)

@Tomskyhaha: phab:T78511 was closed as resolved. 4nn1l2 (talk) 16:34, 19 May 2019 (UTC)

Help! Auxilio! Ajuda! Subtitle markup no longer works!

In the past, subtitles could have markup applied to them to allow for boldface, italics, size changes and the like, but now it no longer works and the markup displays in plain text. I started noticing this recently, like a couple of weeks now. This is problematic as many timedtexts have this markup applied to them, as they worked at the time but for some reason no longer do. – Illegitimate Barrister (talk • contribs), 09:26, 23 May 2019 (UTC)

Ticket created. – Illegitimate Barrister (talk • contribs), 03:04, 24 May 2019 (UTC)

Thanks. This is unfortunately. User:Illegitimate Barrister is there a work around? Does different code need to be used for superscript / bolding etc? Or do we simple remove this stuff? Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 18:31, 11 June 2019 (UTC)

CC button

Does the CC button works? It looks like we have different video player, which does not have it at all. --Juandev (talk) 12:31, 21 March 2020 (UTC)

YT guideline

Something probably changed, because YouTube subtitles have different format than format required here. I had to change both files manually. Do you know of any coverter, which would help here? --Juandev (talk) 12:13, 22 March 2020 (UTC)

With no access to a CLI-Tool, I sometimes use GoTranscript's subtitle converter, however I do NOT obtain my timed text from YT. With CLI-access, I use ffmpeg for most tasks. -- Rillke^(q?) 10:31, 4 February 2024 (UTC)

Feature requests

Timed text is really useful, but I'm having a few difficulties, mostly with musical use cases. At TimedText:Ο Επιτάφιος του Σεῖκιλου - Epitaph of Seikilos.ogg (not sure why that link is red: File:Ο Επιτάφιος του Σεῖκιλου - Epitaph of Seikilos.ogg), I can't easily see which languages already have subtitles, and I can't easily copy the timings from one language to another (re-determining all the cutpoints would be a pain). If it would give a list of extant timed-texts, and ideally let me display two side-by-side such that I can easily cut-and-paste, it would make adding translations a lot easier.

In this particular case, it would be nice, on Wikipedia, to play several languages of timed text simultanously with the sound. The Wikipedia article similarly has a score with the original Koine Greek, a romanization, a transliteration, and an IPA version in development (see talk tab). Adding both a translation and a transliteration for the same language might also be useful. Is it possible to do this, or must all TimedTexts be a translation into one listed language, with one translation allowed per language? Is it possible to add timed Lilypond music-score snippets?

Separately, if I click on the "TimedText" tab from the file page, the resulting page does not have a reciprocal tab that returns me to the file page, which is surprising.

Thank you! HLHJ (talk) 23:48, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

i came here today to write these issues, but you beat me to it. i'll list them in point form, though.

serious problems:

1. no easy way to see what timedtext files already exist for a media file
2. no built-in tool for easy transcription
3. no built-in tool for easy translation from existing timedtext in one language into another
4. no link from timedtext page back to the medial file page
5. (and i'll add 1 more) "Select language and press the Go button" it's freaking annoying to scroll the 300+ list to find a langcode, (even though it's possible to fast locate one by typing the langcode on keyboard).

feature requests:

1. display two or more timedtexts simultaneously
2. (and i'll add 1 more) some way of marking files as "xx-language subtitles needed" to call for volunteers would be good.

RZuo (talk) 20:13, 7 January 2023 (UTC)

Show more than two lines of text in output

When the line of text for subtitles of an audio recording is a bit long (on the "Timed Text" edit page), the output (when playing the file) shows only two lines of text in the display. What would be on the "first" line of the display does not show at all.

See for example the text that is displayed (and not displayed) in this file from 0:12-0:29 (unit 2 on the Timed Text edit page). This is a single unit of text which should be displayed as one. Since this is audio, not video, there is no problem that too much text might cover the picture!

Is there a way to choose to show a larger area to display more text for audio files? Dovi (talk) 09:29, 18 February 2022 (UTC)

New caption isn't added automatically to "Closed captions" template

I created the Occitan version of one video and it's added automatically to the video's options, but not to the "closed captions" template of the video page in Commons, unlike the Catalan version (which I also did) which does appear. --KajenCAT (talk) 23:14, 6 March 2022 (UTC)

Hi, @KajenCAT! Thanks for adding the Occitan subtitles! The reason why they didn't appear in the template, it's because template has limited number of listed languages in it, and I have to add them manually each time I notice the subtitle that were recently added to the Commons, but they didn't display in the template. I'm thinking about how to make it work automatically, but I'm just a beginner in the templates editing. — Pacha Tchernof (talk) 12:16, 7 March 2022 (UTC)

And btw, the Occitan subtitles now appear in the video's Closed captions template, please take a look! :-) — Pacha Tchernof (talk) 12:18, 7 March 2022 (UTC)

@Pacha Tchernof: Thank you very much for solving it! And how I add it to the hidden category of Category:Files with closed captioning in Occitan? (i'm not a regular user of Commons, sorry). Best regards, KajenCAT (talk) 12:36, 7 March 2022 (UTC)

@KajenCAT, you’re welcome! AFAIK, files appear in the new created category after some time, not right after its creation. So, we have to wait a bit. — Pacha Tchernof (talk) 12:47, 7 March 2022 (UTC)

Subtitles/captions not being shown

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T309873

Hello to all, I received a report today that some videos on Wikimedia Commons are not showing the subtitles. I tested in Brazilian Portuguese (this video) and in English (this video), changing my language on the page and confirmed that the subtitles are not being shown. All that appears is the "create captions" option. Can someone take a look on that? Thank you. Good contributions, Ederporto (talk) 20:16, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

Validation

Mention that there are online SRT validators out there one could test one's SRT text on. Jidanni (talk) 09:19, 31 March 2023 (UTC)

COM:VP#Timed Text from automatic speech recognition

On COM:VP#Timed Text from automatic speech recognition, I asked if it is generally desirable to have timed text (closed captions) for time based media (Video, Audio) generated from automatic speech recognition (ASR) like OpenAI's Whisper. Thank you. Rillke^(q?) 10:34, 4 February 2024 (UTC)