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 at Langbase.com — The Composable AI Developer platform · Serverless AI Cloud · Ship agentic AI pipes, tools, and memory with BaseAI — The first Web AI Framework (free, open-source, local-first, deploys serverless, agentic pipes, tools, and memory)
Ex VP DevTools & DevRel Eng. Rapid · Google Developers Advisory Board (gDAB) founding member. 🧑💻 AI/ML/DevTools Angel Investor ❯ AI/ML Advisory Board San Francisco, DevNetwork
🎩 Award-winning Open Source Engineer & Dev Advocate 🦊 Google Developers Expert Web DevRel 🚀 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).
🌳 Node.js foundation Community Committee Outreach Lead, Member Linux Foundation, OpenAPI Business Governing Board, and DigitalOcean Navigator. 📟 Teaching thousands of developers Node.js CLI Automation and VSCode.pro course. Over 142 million views, 24 yrs Blogging, 108K developers learning, 200+ FOSS.
✌️ Author of various open-source dev-tools and software libraries utilized by millions of developers worldwide ⓦ WordPress Core Developer 📣 TEDx Speaker with 100+ international talks.
✨ As quoted by: Satya Nadella · CEO of Microsoft — Awais is an awesome example for developers.
💜 Loves his wife (Maedah) ❯ Read more about Ahmad Awais.
👋… Awais is mostly active on 𝕏 @MrAhmadAwais
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