Alright, so yesterday I was trying to figure out a way to get a movie with closed captions to play with spoken audio. Yeah, I wanted to turn those written words into actual speech. Sounds a bit crazy, right? But I was determined to make it work, mostly because I wanted to help a friend who has some hearing issues. Movies are great, but they’re not so great when you can’t hear the dialogue.
First, I searched around online to see what others had done. I found that closed captions are a big deal for folks who are hard of hearing, which I already knew, but it was good to see it confirmed. There are special devices for this, but I didn’t have one of those on hand.
Then I stumbled upon some tools that could maybe do the trick. One of them was called Zubtitle. It’s a web-based thing that lets you mess with one video for free, but after that, you gotta pay. And it wasn’t cheap, like 19 to 49 bucks a month. I thought, “No way am I paying that much!” especially since I was just trying to help out a friend, not start a whole business or anything.
I also learned that big movie theater chains like AMC are starting to show movies with on-screen captions. That’s pretty cool, making movies more accessible and all, but it didn’t really help me with my immediate problem.
So, I kept digging. I found some technical stuff about where captions are usually placed on the screen (bottom center, in case you’re curious) and how they should disappear when there’s no talking. That was kind of interesting, but still not what I needed.
I decided I needed to get more hands-on. I downloaded a few open-source tools that deal with speech recognition and text-to-speech. My plan was to somehow feed the closed captions into a speech recognition tool, then pipe that into a text-to-speech engine. Sounds simple enough, right?
- I spent a good chunk of time just trying to get these tools to work together. There was a lot of trial and error, let me tell you.
- Finally, I managed to get a basic setup working. It wasn’t perfect, the voice sounded a bit robotic, and sometimes it would trip over itself, especially with longer sentences or weird character names.
- But hey, it was actually reading the captions out loud! I was pretty stoked, even though it was a bit janky.
After some more tweaking and tuning, I got it to a point where it was মোটামুটি understandable. It still had its moments, but it was way better than nothing. I showed it to my friend, and while they laughed at the robotic voice, they were genuinely happy to be able to follow along with the movie without struggling.
Wrapping it up
It was a fun little project, and it felt good to help out a friend. Plus, I learned a bunch about closed captions and how they work. It made me appreciate the folks who work on this stuff to make things more accessible. Who knows, maybe I’ll try to refine this setup even more in the future. There’s always room for improvement, right?
