Auto-Generated Captions (like on YouTube)

I spend a good amount of time trying to find subtitles for my TV and movie libraries. Sometimes I am able to find them on the major subtitles websites, or using the subtitle search feature of Plex. However, for the (majority of) times where I am unsuccessful, it would be great if Plex could take a stab at using speech-recognition software, to auto-generate captions. This feature exists on YouTube, and I find it extremely helpful, even with the inevitable mistakes. Is there any way this could be implemented from within Plex?

I feel like what you see on YouTube (I know what you mean) would have some SERIOUS horsepower behind it.

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I second this, I would LOVE it.

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Yes, please, thank you! I couldn’t agree more! For some reason, even after searching using the recommended means, it was hard to find this specific post (I just posted another thread which was closed due to this feature suggestion thread that the moderator told me about).

I’m hard-of-hearing, but even for those that aren’t, having auto-generated captions with perhaps the option to download and edit would just make life easier. I’m so used to YouTube captioning that I feel this would be such a wonderful feature to have available. Many times, the time spent in finding subtitles or creating subtitles is so much that I end up doing nothing at all. But I have a lot of content that isn’t on YouTube.

I hope people vote for this feature! When I watch things remotely on my iPhone, it would be incredible to have this as an option.

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Yes, please. I am on

Auto-generated captions would be AMAZING! :+1:

I have old tutorials in my Plex server nothing that you could find a subtitle anywhere, in general auto-generated caption would be great for personal videos.

Please add this feature. :crossed_fingers:

They would be great!!

Annoying how Plex never seem to provide any updates to subtitles.

Bump!

This is an interesting feature suggestion. I’ve been able to find the subtitles I need using Plex’s Opensubtitle search when I don’t have them.

I heard about a plug in called Sub Zero but I haven’t tried it.

Back to the feature (clears throat)… I’m thinking that it could possibly get tripped up if there are multiple languages. What language would it listen for?

And alternative that came to mind immediately after I saw the post is that in Windows 11 now you have the ability to have captions for any audio in the system regardless of where it’s coming from. I’ve tested it out while watching something to see if it can keep up. It did a decent job. In the meantime, those with capable systems can use that or something similar I guess. Although, again there’s the potential issue of when the language changes mid sentence… what language does it listen for?

No it doesn’t. You can do live transcription on your phone now, with very little resources.

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Continuing the discussion from Failed to download subtitle:

Seeing that the issue of downloading subtitles has been a recurring problem throughout Plex’s long history, I propose the consideration of using the neural net Whisper for on-the-fly subtitling and captioning. This can be accomplished via API. If that approach is not feasible due to overhead costs, then finding, funding, and supporting a free and open-source model that is compact and can run locally would be ideal—think of a transformer language model or another natural language processing (NLP) model.

Let’s not ‘stream’ around the bush; we need better subtitles, and we need them now! :popcorn:

Bump :slight_smile:
As pro account, I support!

I would really appreciate having this feature.

AI can be used to auto generate SRT subtitles for video media.

I am requesting an implementation of this to be added:

  1. Add a menu item at the individual video content level to generate an SRT for this video.
  2. Add a menu item at the library level to generate SRTs for all videos in this library (skip where auto-generated SRTs already exist).
  3. Scheduled tasks - when the task scheduler runs maintenance routines, automatically generate SRT files for videos that don’t already have an auto-generated one. This feature could be toggled on/off in the Settings > Scheduled Tasks options.

This would save countless wasted hours of human lives spent searching for the correct SRT files and synching up the subtitles to the video.

It would be nice if PLEX implemented the whisper model to freely generate .srt files as a task for movies which don’t have or can’t find a sub track in the built in search or from it’s source folder. Whisper is a free model too. I have personally used it to generate .srt files for audio tracks.

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Bumping

How about using AI to auto generate subtitles and then give the option to automatically mute the audio for nasty words?

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Just a simple ask. Develop or invest in a AI engine that can automatically analyze the audio from all media sources (even home videos) to determine and provide a universal (platform) subtitle feature. It may require transcoding at first, but it would be cool to eventually have a release that can analyze and deliver audio-sourced subtitles via Direct Play!

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Youtube autotranslate does not always provide a good translation, but in case of missing subtitles it might be better than nothing.

I believe this could be done during adding new media. That would be better than doing it during transcoding. While Plex also creates thumbnails from the Video, it could extract the Audio and create subtitles for a list of chosen languages.