Ahmad Awais
After building the VSCode.pro course, I wanted to make it more accessible by adding Closed Captions to the videos. I use Vimeo to host videos and they provide an interface for adding subtitles/captions.
My apprentice and I wrote the closed captions ourselves and everything went well. Except for two videos where I would get an error when I uploaded the subtitles/captions file.
I searched a lot and even rewrote the captions but couldn’t find a fix until just now. So, sharing that fix in this post in the hope of making someone else’s life easier.
When I uploaded these .srt Closed Captions files, I got an error that read like Invalid Caption File. What the heck is that, I thought? No more info, just tht the caption file is invalid.
⚡ After searching around I figured that maybe it’s the < and > characters — since the videos were about HTML code and I had <span> and <p> in my captions.
🤔 So, I went ahead and encoded the entire contents of these captions files. You can use a site like this, paste the contents of your .srt file inside the Decoded block and copy the generated contents in the Encoded block back into the file. Maybe just replace --> back to -->.
Now when you upload the captions to Vimeo — they just work!
Peace! ✌️
Founder & CEO of ⌘ Command Code coding agent with taste. Founded Langbase.com, AI cloud to build, deploy, and scale AI agents with tools & memory · Creator of Command.new.
"Awais is an awesome example for developers" — Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft.
NASA Mars Ingenuity Helicopter mission code contributor 8th GitHub Stars Award recipient with 5x GitHub Stars Award (Listed as GitHub's #1 JavaScript trending developer). Google Developers Expert Web DevRel.
Ex VP Eng (DevTools & DevRel) Rapid · Google Developers Advisory Board (gDAB) founding member · AI/ML/DevTools Angel Investor (Replit, Resend, Daytona, Gumroad and you?) ❯ AI/ML Advisory Board San Francisco, DevNetwork.
Award-winning Open Source Engineering leader authored hundreds of open-source dev-tools and software libraries used by millions of developers, including Shades of Purple code theme and corona-cli.
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