Transcribe Videos¶
Fast Video Cataloger can generate text transcripts from the audio in your videos, making spoken content searchable and browsable. There are two ways to get transcripts into your catalog: native speech-to-text powered by Whisper, or importing existing SRT subtitle files.
Native Speech-to-Text Transcription¶
To enable automatic transcription during indexing, open Preferences and go to the Video Indexer tab. Check Enable Speech-to-Text Transcription to reveal the model and language settings.
Whisper Model -- Path to a Whisper GGML model file. The bundled model WhisperModels\ggml-base.en.bin works well for English. For other languages or higher accuracy, download additional models from huggingface.co/ggerganov/whisper.cpp and use the ... browse button to select the file.
Language -- Choose the language spoken in your videos from the dropdown, or select Auto-detect to let the model determine the language automatically. Available languages include English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Russian.
With transcription enabled, every new video you index will have its audio extracted and transcribed automatically. The process runs in two phases: audio extraction followed by transcription, with progress displayed in the indexing window.
Transcribe Already-Indexed Videos¶
You can transcribe videos that are already in your catalog without re-indexing their frames. Right-click one or more selected videos and choose Index > Transcribe Audio from the context menu. This runs speech-to-text on the selected videos using your current transcription settings while skipping frame capture entirely.
Import SRT Files¶
There are two ways to import subtitle files as transcripts.
Automatic import during indexing -- In Preferences > Video Indexer, check Add transcript from srt file. When indexing a video, the program looks for a .srt file with the same name as the video in the same folder and imports it as the transcript automatically.
Manual import from the transcript window -- If a video has no transcript, the transcript window shows an Add button. Click it to browse for a subtitle file. Both .srt and .sub formats are supported. Importing a file replaces any existing transcript for that video.
Using the Transcript Window¶
The transcript window displays the full transcript for the currently selected video as a scrollable list of lines with timestamps.
Click to seek -- Click any line in the transcript to jump the video player to that point in the video.
Live highlighting -- During playback, the currently spoken line is automatically selected and scrolled into view, so the transcript follows along as the video plays.
Thumbnail tooltips -- Hover over a transcript line to see a tooltip with a thumbnail image from that point in the video, the subtitle text, and the time range.
In-window search -- Use the search bar at the top of the transcript window to find words in the transcript. Type a term and press Enter or click Search. Matching lines are highlighted with a blue background and underline. When there are multiple matches, use the < and > buttons to navigate between them. Each navigation step also seeks the video to the matching line.
Context menu on a line -- Right-click a transcript line to access Add frame (captures a thumbnail at that time) and Add to playlist (adds that time to the current playlist).
Context menu on empty area -- Right-click the empty area of the transcript list to access Remove transcript, which deletes the entire transcript for the video.
Searching Transcripts¶
The Search window includes a Transcript filter section. Type a word to find all videos that contain that word in their transcript. The transcript search matches the whole word, not partial matches.
When you select a video from the search results, the transcript window opens with the search term pre-filled and matching lines highlighted, so you can immediately see where the word appears and navigate to those moments.
For transcription model and language settings, see the Video Indexer preferences page.