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 .srt
Β 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.
β‘ 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.
π€ 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
Β file inside the Decoded block and copy the generated contents in the Encoded block back into the file. Maybe just replace -->
Β back to -->
.
Now when you upload the captions to Vimeo β they just work!
Peace! βοΈ