Add support for auto-generated captions

[senpl]

Any progress on that ??? It seems work at first, then stops and says: "Sorry, automatic subtitles on YouTube are not supported at this time. You can find supported videos by searching YouTube and filtering by 'Subtitles/CC'"

[mikesteele]

Hi! No progress at the moment, sorry. I'm working on using captions from the video, that's on the intercept-captions branch and the open PR #52 . I think this work will make automatic captions possible - I'll investigate after. :-)

[vinniec]

Any progress yet? :D There are so many videos with automatically generated subtitles only, it would be nice if this work. I don't know if it can be useful in terms of code but, youtube-dl seems to be able to download the pre-generated subtitles, maybe you can try to see how they do it.

[mikesteele]

@vinniec Hey! :-) I'm not sure the benefit of automatic subtitles in the app without Google Translate. (Which was removed a few versions ago) If the YouTube parser supported automatic subtitles, you could, for example, load automatic subtitles and show them underneath in-video subtitles. It would also allow Bookmarking automatic subtitles. Would that be useful?

As for supporting it in the parser, this is where that logic would live: https://github.com/mikesteele/dual-captions/blob/master/content_script/src/parsers/youtube.js#L12

[vinniec]

I don't know if I understood correctly because I don't know how your plugin works, so I apologize if I'll say big stupid things. I can assume that your plugin downloads static subtitles and then translates them with google translate. But maybe you don't have to translate automatic subtitles since they are already translated? I think that automatic subtitles often have errors due to the interpretation of google speak to text, but the translation transcription tries to be always literal, instead it can happen that the translations transcription made by people are with the correct meaning but not literal for a question of brevity.

Or the problem is in the parser?

[mikesteele]

No no it's ok, I don't think I'm doing a good job of explaining.

When this issue was created in 2018, it meant that automatic subtitles would be Google Translated. The idea was that you could find a video in English with English automatic subtitles and have, say, French underneath. The French would be Google Translated, because lots of videos on YouTube only have automatic captions, so you wouldn't be able to use French subtitles from the video.

Google Translate support was removed (may be added back in the future) so I'm wondering what this feature would look like now. Can you describe the experience you want to have? As an example, I could imagine a user in France who wants to learn English from a particular video that only has automatic subtitles but not French.

[vinniec]

I think what you said was exactly what I had in mind. Look for videos in the original language (e.g. English) with subtitles (automatic or handwritten) and together see the subtitles (automatic or hand-translated) in my native language (e.g. Italian).

[berniegp]

I suspect this is the commit you refer to: 95a8f3fbe161d519a1e44a48b96aa7a9c37e51e6

Why was Google translate support removed? I got this extension hoping to Google translate Netflix subtitles to English where there is no English version available from Netflix. Is there some fundamental incompatibility with Google translate?