Ahmad Awais

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Fix Invalid Caption File on Vimeo

Ahmad AwaisAhmad 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.

Invalid Caption File Error#

When I uploaded these .srtΒ Closed Captions files, I got an error that read like Invalid Caption File.Β 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 <Β and >Β characters β€” since the videos were about HTML code and I had <span>Β and <p>Β in my captions.

πŸ€” 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 .srtΒ file inside the Decoded block and copy the generated contents in the Encoded block back into the file. Maybe just replace --&#x3E;Β back to -->.

Now when you upload the captions to Vimeo β€” they just work!

Peace! ✌️

 

Founder & CEO of Langbase.com β€” The most powerful serverless AI developer platform for building AI products Β· Ship agentic AI pipes, tools, and memory with BaseAI β€” The first Web AI Framework (free, open-source, local-first, deploys serverless, agentic pipes, tools, and memory). Check out the State of AI Agents 2024.

Ex VP DevTools & DevRel Eng. Rapid Β· Google Developers Advisory Board (gDAB) founding member. πŸ§‘β€πŸ’» AI/ML/DevTools Angel Investor ❯ AI/ML Advisory Board San Francisco, DevNetwork

🎩 Award-winning Open Source Engineer & Dev Advocate 🦊 Google Developers Expert Web DevRel πŸš€ NASA Mars Ingenuity Helicopter mission code contributor πŸ† 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. πŸ“Ÿ 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 πŸ“£ TEDx Speaker with 100+ international talks.

✨ As quoted by: Satya Nadella Β· CEO of Microsoft β€” Awais is an awesome example for developers.
πŸ’œ Loves his wife (Maedah) ❯ Read more about Ahmad Awais.

πŸ‘‹β€¦ Awais is mostly active on 𝕏 @MrAhmadAwais

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