
Show HN: Video subtitle maker - justswim
https://www.kapwing.com/subtitles
======
justswim
Hi everyone! I'm Eric, one of the developers behind this. Adding subtitles to
videos has been a really hard problem so we wanted to make a simple web tool
for it. The other tools online only let you create an srt file or just overlay
subtitles. But for content on social media, it's really important to burn the
captions directly into the video. So that's what this tool is for! Thanks for
checking it out!

~~~
hux_
Why is it important to burn the captions in? Can you expand on the social
media reasons?

~~~
joshshifman
Not OP, but my guess is that videos autoplay on feeds (FB and twitter for
example) but without sound. Therefore, burning in the subtitles is kind of a
hacky way to engage users.

~~~
Flimm
When Facebook autoplays a video, doesn't it also automatically enable the SRT
subtitles?

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carusooneliner
Kudos on building a nifty tool -- I found your subtitle and other editors
quite easy to use. Your key differentiator seems to be in bringing together
several video editing tools under one web app. What would make it stand apart
is if you let users add subtitles, sound effects, resize, etc. in a single
workflow.

A few bugs I encountered:

1\. The Blog and My Account links in the footer either 404 or do nothing.

2\. On the subtitle editor page, I scratched my head a bit trying to figure
where to type the subtitle. It'll help if you make the input text field look
editable with a blinking cursor, pen icon, etc.

3\. When I uploaded a 460x460 video to the subtitle editor, the subtitle
options on the left overflowed the webpage and were not scrollable.

4\. The command line output log that is displayed when the video is being
processed post edit is TMI and could confuse a lay user.

Hope this helps.

------
floathub
For those who might be looking for similar online titling tools, there's also
dotSUB ([https://dotsub.com/view/](https://dotsub.com/view/)). You can use the
same timings to translate into other languages. Just FYI [edited to lower
snark]

~~~
justswim
dotSUB is really cool, but it doesn't burn the subtitles directly into the
video. This is really important for content creators on social media, because
they don't get to control the player through which the video is watched. So
this is an important differentiator for Kapwing!

------
jackvalentine
Hi! I really like this!

I've used Aegisub to do dramas and music video translations before.

Which brings me to the inevitable feature request: more colours and stroking
the text.

Every subbing job I've been involved in I've used yellow text with a black
stroke because it's visible on any light or dark background without issue.

A low res example here:
[http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/x/w/5/h/image.relat...](http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/x/w/5/h/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.xvdm.png/1276090640143.jpg)

------
abainbridge
Is there a feature to put a semi transparent black rectangle behind the text
so that you can read it when the video image is the same colour as the text?

~~~
justswim
Unfortunately not right now, but we are working on it. You can however change
the font color! Thanks for checking it out.

~~~
def_true_false
Border colour options would be nice... or just having a preset with yellow
text with black borders.

------
Flimm
I'm always on the look-out for software that supports right-to-left languages
(and Arabic specifically). Sadly, this doesn't. The final rendered video
doesn't render Arabic properly. Looks cool, though, thanks for sharing!

------
braindead_in
Here's a free automated transcript. No typing required.

[https://scribie.com/transcript/37316433662740289509d4234c14f...](https://scribie.com/transcript/37316433662740289509d4234c14fd1ebef58de5)

~~~
always_good
That needs some pretty heavy proofreading + editing, so there definitely is
typing required.

------
Ryel
Congratulations on launching!

I've never needed to subtitle a video so I don't really know who your
competitors might be but none of the links posted so far in this thread
(except for yours) seem to be very easy or intuitive to use.

I love your logo character too!

------
confiscate
Wow that's pretty cool! What library did you use for this? Because it would be
cool to call out any Open Source projects you used, to give back recognition
to the Open Source contributors

~~~
justswim
Yes, we primarily rely on MoviePy
([https://github.com/Zulko/moviepy/](https://github.com/Zulko/moviepy/)) to do
the heavy lifting on the actual native video editing part of it. It's an
awesome library!

------
lern_too_spel
Why would I use this over YouTube's transcriber application, which
automatically transcribes most of the video and aligns the text to the audio?

~~~
takumo
Looking at the site, it appears to target other platforms like Facebook,
Twitter and Instagram where videos are often viewed without sound, and which
don't have built-in support for subtitles.

~~~
lern_too_spel
You can export the video from YouTube, just like you can export it from this
application.

------
kazinator
What?

I'm not going to upload footage to a site to make subs.

There is no shortage of subtitling tools that run locally on your PC and just
open the video.

~~~
justswim
It is hard to do in simple software like iMovie. The timeline UI makes it
difficult to enter text and set the timings in an easy way. We like the idea
of being able to subtitle a video without having to download any software too.

So yes, there are alternatives, but we believe that our product is much easier
to use.

------
superasn
Kudos on launching. BTW is this free? Last I checked it seemed quite CPU
intensive to encode/decode long videos.

~~~
justswim
It's free to use but we add a watermark. It costs $2 to remove the watermark
for a single video, $10 for a monthly subscription for unlimited videos
without watermarks. But actually you can also remove the watermark for free
too. We wrote an interesting post about that here:
[https://www.kapwing.com/blog/skipping-our-paywall-with-an-
ap...](https://www.kapwing.com/blog/skipping-our-paywall-with-an-apology/)

As for the CPU usage - it is quite intensive so we set up a Linode instance
dedicated to processing the videos. It costs us $80 a month, but Linode
throttles it automatically. That's nice because if a lot of videos are being
created, it just means that they get created slower for everyone. But they
don't fail.

------
aeontech
Would there be a way to download the generated subtitles as a srt as well?

~~~
justswim
Not quite yet, but we're looking into it. Any reason why you prefer having the
.srt file? Is it helpful for uploading to other sites?

~~~
aeontech
No, mainly archival and ability to playback from local media / my hardware
player. If I spend hours subtitling something, I want ability to export my
hard work.

