Service Outage Notification

Update Friday, July 12, 8:00 AM CDT-US.

Well, friends, it looks like this might not be salvageable. For the last couple of hours, I have not been able to get reliable API access to the altenrate source for captions data that I had hoped to switch to since being cut off by Youtube. Sadly, that's the status for now. It may work sometimes and it may not and there's nothing at this end that I can do about the times where it isn't working. Apologies, everyone. It was a good run.

Update Thursday, 2019-07-11, 7:00 AM CDT-US.

From Mike Ridgway: Have been working non-stop for the last 14 hours or so trying to restore tools for accessing .srt versions of captions and subtitles. Am pretty close to being able to publish what we could call a release candidate, a version that we hope will work as intended.

Update Wednesday, 2019-07-10, 9:20 AM CDT-US. PARTIAL RESTORATION OF SERVICE

Update Thursday, July 11, 4:30 PM CDT-US.

.srt data access has been restored.

Update Thursday, 2019-07-11, 7:00 AM CDT-US.

From Mike Ridgway: Have been working non-stop for the last 14 hours or so trying to restore tools for accessing .srt versions of captions and subtitles. Am pretty close to being able to publish what we could call a release candidate, a version that we hope will work as intended.

Update Wednesday, 2019-07-10, 9:20 AM CDT-US. PARTIAL RESTORATION OF SERVICE

From Mike Ridgway: I've been able to take advantage of an alternate source for captions, to partially rectify the problem. Using the input box below, you should be able to get text of captions or subtitles for most YouTube videos that actually have captions or subtitles. There are still a few exceptions. Unfortunately, .srt (time-tagged data isn't yet available, nor is it currently possible to use the captions Editor. Your patience is appreciated. I'll be working on continuing to restore service after a few hours of sleep.

Update Tuesday, 2019-07-09 6:45 PM CDT-US.

We now know that this site is being denied access to captions information via one of the YouTube APIs that we make use of due to spikes in traffic from this site that Google considers to exceed fair use. This is primarily a result of a small handful of DIY Captions users who use the site to make a very large number of captions request in a very small amount of time. If this is you, we have to ask you to no longer use our site in this way as your use means that no one can use the site.

The webmaster, me, Mike Ridgway, is an admitted amateur programmer and figuring out how to solve the "problem" of overuse by a few is going to take some research on my part to resolve. I will keep you posted.

Initial post. Tuesday, 2019-07-09 6:00 PM CDT-US.

Dear awesome DIY Captions fans. As of today, July 9, 2019, 6 PM (18:00) Central Daylight Time (US) DIY Captions is unable to provide captions and subtitles for YouTube videos due, potentially, to changes in the YouTube Application Programmer Interface (API) that this site relies on.

The webmaster is working presently on attempting to address this issue. In the meantime, YouTube Trasncription Pad is available still if you would like to be able to do manual transcription of YouTube videos.

Apologies for the inconvenience. Will keep you updated as attempts to restore service progress.

Download YouTube video captions and subtitles

DIY Captions isn't just for automatic captions anymore. Now, access any of a video's captions or subtitles tracks, regardless of the language.

What are automatic captions?

Automatic captions are machine transcriptions of the words heard in a YouTube video performed by Google software. While those transcriptions are almost never perfect, more and more, the accuracy seems to be improving. When it comes to transcribing videos for the purpose of making subtitles, automatic captions can mean fewer words that have to be typed by humans.

Quickly turn YouTube's automatic captions into clean transcripts

This app is intended to make it easy to access the automatic captions that YouTube creates for videos and to manually correct any transcription errors so that the text can be used to create more professional-looking captions. For videos where the accuracy of the automatic captions is high, using automatic captions can significantly reduce the amount of time that it takes to type a transcript of a video's spoken content. The DIY Captions Editor is loaded with powerful keyboard shortcuts to substantially increase your editing efficiency. Look for the "Keyboard Shortcuts" item in the menu to learn more or watch the video below to see them in action.

 

 

About the DIY Captions Transcription Pad

If you don't need to import automatic captions or if automatic captions aren't available for your video and you're just looking for a simple but powerful interface for transcribing content or taking notes in a web page that's integrated with a YouTube player, Transcription Pad allows you to do free-form text editing (similar to Window's Notepad) but with the ability to start, stop, and rewind the video while you're typing, along with powerful keyboard shortcuts for speeding up the editing process.

 

Contact Info.

Mike Ridgway
St. Louis, Missouri, USA
miketangoromeo ĀȚ gmail.com
801-438-4139
Skype: miketangoromeo

Feedback welcome.

© 2015 - 2018, Mike Ridgway