you need content — grab text from video

Certainly someone reading this will find the process I’m about to explain valuable at some point — maybe there’s an instructional video you’d like transcribed or a clip from a family gathering where there was something you want to remember without re-watching your movie again.  I don’t know… surely you’ll think of something.

I needed verbiage for a project I’m working on and I wanted to take what was was said within a video and convert it into a text document. A Google search rendered results that linked to several websites with instructions on how to BUY their product to help me accomplish my goal.  Most everything I found was over $200 bucks, and I didn’t need the content that badly, so I put my feeble brain into action and figured out a way! I’m going to share it with you…

PLEASE NOTE: PULLING OUT CONTENT (INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY) THAT BELONGS TO SOMEONE ELSE TO USE IN ANY WAY AS YOUR OWN IS A VIOLATION OF COPYRIGHT LAWS. Please don’t do it.

Upload the video you want to transcribe to youtube.com if it’s not already there.  When you upload a video to youtube, subtitles and closed captions are created.  You have to wait until the video upload is complete and the video has processed.  Then here’s what you do:

1. Open your video page from the link provided in your Chrome browser and look for the CC (closed caption) button at the bottom of the video.
2. Click it, and then pause the video so you’re not distracted.
3. Windows users… hit F12 on your keyboard   |   Mac users… hit Option+Cmd+J
4. Next, type in the following:

   if(yt.config_.TTS_URL.length) window.location.href=yt.config_.TTS_URL+"&kind=asr&fmt=srv1&lang=en"

5.  This grabs the transcribed text of the uploaded video — just save it with a .html extension.
6. Open your new file in your browser window and copy (Ctl+C) the page contents (you won’t see the code that’s required for closed captioning to properly display).
7. Next, paste (Ctl+V) into your favorite text editing application (Word or Text Wrangler… whatever) and make it pretty by formatting.

That’s all there is to it — except for thanking me later.