Transcriptor now Supports SRT Upload and Conversion

Wed, 05 Aug 2020 20:37:00 -0000

A few weeks ago, I was tasked with a new transcription project.

The project was to create subtitles for a few videos with the intention of expanding the job to several hours of work if the work was good enough quality. While I was certain that I could figure it out, Transcriptor was designed for custom text templates, not the standard SRT format. So instead of doing manual conversion of these files I decided to put the work in to make Transcriptor support both the importing and exporting of SRT files. This meant also for the first time working with the end_times in text markers and focusing on getting timing down to the exact word.

While there were wonderful options to work with SRT files I knew that I would want to build my own variation of an SRT engine. This was mostly because of future plans for transcriptor which for the first time I'm putting out there.

You can create a Job object from an srt using Job.from_srt(). and passing in the filepath of the object.

from transcriptor import Job

NewSRTJob = Job.from_srt('./srt_file.srt')

This give you the ability to create new objects from this job (currently a text transcription file). You also have the ability to break down the transcription word by word and by marker. This gives you the ability to apply shifts to all or some of the srt files without having to re-index the project.

for marker in NewSRTJob.markers:
    marker.start_time += 2.0
    marker.end_time -= 2.0

Path('shifted_srt_file.srt').write_text(NewSRTJob.srt)

SRT support is avaiable on versions of Transcriptor since the version series of 2020.07. You can start using Transcriptor by installing the package from PyPI.

pip install transcriptor