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I work on OpenSubs, a free, open source (AGPL-3.0) subtitle tool that runs entirely in the browser tab.

You drop in a video file, and Whisper transcribes it on your own machine, using transformers.js with WebGPU where available and WebAssembly otherwise. The model (40–250 MB) downloads once and is cached. There is no upload endpoint in the product, so the video has nowhere to go.

After that you can:

  • fix lines by typing over them (click a timestamp to jump to that moment)
  • translate into 20 languages with Chrome's built-in on-device translator
  • pick one of 12 caption styles, including word-by-word highlighting
  • export SRT / VTT / ASS, or burn the subtitles into an MP4 (libass compiled to WebAssembly, encoded with WebCodecs)

A few things I learned building it:

  • Whisper hallucinates on silence and music ("Thanks for watching!", or the Japanese equivalent). A Silero VAD pass runs before Whisper, and a cleanup step drops the known stock phrases.
  • Singing doesn't count as speech for the VAD, so a music video gets a "no speech found" warning. You can still force it.

Honest limits: it only takes video files, not audio-only files. Cue timings can't be edited yet. Builds are release candidates. Everything that runs locally is free with no account; the only paid part is optional cloud translation on our backend (US$5 for 1000 credits), and you can bring your own Claude / OpenAI / DeepL key instead.

Site: https://opensubs.app/ Code: https://github.com/open-subs/opensubs

Feedback welcome, especially on languages where the transcription goes wrong.

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[-] gary_host_laptop@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 day ago

i love how anti ai people have become the wardens of copyright somehow.

[-] Sammirr@aussie.zone 3 points 1 day ago

Statement of fact. Claude was engineered with copyright material.

[-] gary_host_laptop@lemmy.ml 0 points 23 hours ago

whats wrong is not copyright theft. whats wrong is labour that was stolen.

[-] Sammirr@aussie.zone 1 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago)

Yes and no. As an author of open source projects, they were made available for people to fork, improve and conrribute under permissive licenses. Then come LLMs that uses code like mine to generate code or slop. My choice about license was made before LLMs. Now they use derivatives of my work without attribution as required by the license.

Even if I change the license, it won't be respected, and nothing else will change. To me, that's copyright infringement on me, ignoring the hours I put in.

On a separate note, LLMs only produce more of the same, ignoring the environmental and economic impacts. Often, more of the same is not what we need. It leads to the same mistakes being made. I've never used LLM to code, never will.

[-] gary_host_laptop@lemmy.ml 1 points 10 hours ago

as a pirate, i shit on copyright, culture should be free. the issue with llm is not that they used copyrighted shit, if the llm would be open source and not owned by a corpo, i'd be contributing to knowledge. here, you're just contributing to some gringo westoid billionaire's pockets. everything is a remix, i dont have an issue with that. so again, the issue is labour theft in marxists terms.

this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2026
182 points (90.6% liked)

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