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, the most used coding agent for open models: 160K+ users, 50K+ paying customers. Founded Langbase (AI cloud for agents with memory & tools).
"What an awesome example for developers." — Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, on my NASA Ingenuity code.
NASA Ingenuity Mars Helicopter code contributor · 6× GitHub Star, one of the first 8 Gold Stars · #1 trending JavaScript developer on GitHub · 6× Google Developer Expert · 6× Microsoft MVP.
Ex VP DevRel & DevTools at RapidAPI · Google Developers Advisory Board (gDAB) founding member · OpenAPI Business Governing Board, Linux Foundation · SF DevNetwork AI/ML Advisory Board · Angel investor (Replit, Resend, Daytona, Gumroad and you?).
Award-winning open source engineering leader: 300+ projects, 50–100M downloads a year, including Shades of Purple (5M+ developers) and corona-cli (10B+ queries).
Taught 217K+ developers via NodeCLI.com and VSCode.pro. 160+ talks. Blogging since 2000, billions of views.
❯ Read more about Ahmad Awais or come say hi on 𝕏 @MrAhmadAwais.
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Ahmad Awais