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OpenSubs: I built a subtitle generator that runs Whisper in the browser, so the video never gets uploaded (opensubs.app)

submitted 2 days ago by opensubs@lemmy.world to c/opensource@lemmy.ml

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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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[-] idriss@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 day ago

yep, I would rather generate one with Claude to my liking and make it more efficient (target the CLI for example)

[-] antianarchist@sopuli.xyz 9 points 1 day ago

Which is absolutely legit. I only criticize the people releasing a “production ready” product, which is nothing but a PoC and then also claim that it is AGPL-3, while abandoning it after 2 months. This hurts the open source community imho.

[-] fegular@lemmy.zip 1 points 17 hours ago

while abandoning it after 2 months. This hurts the open source community imho.

I dont expect them to maintain it for eternity. The problem is people expect too much from the authors as if it's the author's duty to fix bugs and add features. And tbh, this attitude hurts open source community more than anything. Ffs, the code is open source, do what you like. The author is not responsible for everything. Be grateful that the code is open-source.

[-] antianarchist@sopuli.xyz 2 points 17 hours ago

I am not talking about the many projects, where you have a single developer just enjoying making software, while providing it to the open source community. I have zero expectations to those projects.

I am talking about people promoting their open source products. Making a fancy website. Act professionally. All this behavior causes people to have expectations. So why invest time into promoting it in the first place? There is literally no need to do this, expect for the owner to attract more and more people.

Don’t promise a sky scraper if you can only maintain a bungalow.

[-] Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world 2 points 23 hours ago

This hurts the open source community imho.

Nah. At worst the open source community is indifferent. If someone can pick up where this left off then it benefits the community.

[-] oopsgodisdeadmybad@lemmy.zip 2 points 18 hours ago

All "generated code" hurts open source, actually.

[-] Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world 2 points 17 hours ago

Badly written code hurts open source, but humans are just as guilty of that as machines.

[-] oopsgodisdeadmybad@lemmy.zip 1 points 1 hour ago

These are not mutually exclusive.

[-] fegular@lemmy.zip 0 points 17 hours ago

How? Genuinely curious.

[-] oopsgodisdeadmybad@lemmy.zip 1 points 55 minutes ago

For starters, maintainers are getting bombarded with "contributions" that are just generated code, because now unskilled coders that can't even write a "hello world" project are just dumping what they think are great ideas without doing any kind of quality control at all.

Just having to be educated enough to even build a project was a very important barrier to the amount of submissions.

Now any Tom, Dick, or Harry can submit endless amounts of shit to a huge amount of different projects.

Maintainers can't keep up with the review process for this level of garbage. This has gotta be killing huge amounts of projects, or at least slamming the brakes on them.

Personally I'm totally in favor of some kind of foundational killswitch within compilers that just detects AI output and refuses to compile. Now that just kicks the can down the road because other compilers exist, but you get what I'm saying.

I can't be arsed to trust any AI code AT ALL. So every single character of it is poison IMHO, but given what it's currently doing to the industry already (and the fact that we're still a single digit amount of years into its existence at all), nothing good causes this many problems.

We're a lot closer to solving capitalism than we are to making any of the effort out towards AI being useful. Until then, any attempt at making it good will just be helping fascists have more tools at their disposal.

It goes way deeper than "but it helps me do stuff". That opinion honestly reads as if you're gen alpha.

And even in a perfect world where capitalism is barely remembered as a bump in the road to civilization, I will never be able to trust any code not written by humans. The kids will call that whatever the millennial insult version of "boomer" is, but I hope that attitude never goes away.

If you're doing your own thing, and you wanna add in some slop code to finish up a little change to something, you go right ahead. But don't you dare submit that to any actual open source project.