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 zaknenou@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com

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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: @Majestic@lemmy.ml 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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[-] ZWQbpkzl@hexbear.net 4 points 3 months ago

Two ideas:

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.
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.

[-] zaknenou@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 3 months ago

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

[-] ZWQbpkzl@hexbear.net 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.

[-] magic_smoke@links.hackliberty.org 1 points 3 months ago

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

[-] zaknenou@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 3 months ago

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