[browser extension] Import fails from YouTube

Bugs
1

Hello,

It seems YouTube changed something about their transcripts such that the extension now fails to extract it.

Example video with an issue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fl7v1lDoC0 - tried in both Firefox and Chrome, the issue persists in both, and I get the message “Failed to extract transcript from YouTube video.”

Happy to provide any further useful info or test a fix.

Thanks much!

p.s. I’ve been using the Firefox extension for a few months now, it’s been wonderful! Thank you once again for publishing it.

2

This seems to be somewhat intermittent? I just tried on the original video again and it worked, but it won’t work on a different video.

3

Have the same issue, also on chrome and firefox.

4

Something has definitely changed. I copy the transcript direct from YouTube (rather than use Readlang’s import feature), and in the last few days this has become much more difficult. The transcript is there, but in very large letters, which block out the “toggle time labels” three dots, and also block out the language button. I’m getting this on PC and Android tablet, on Chrome and on Edge. For the time being, I’m using Turboscribe where necessary, or Readlang’s AI refine feature to get rid of the timestamps.

5

I’m getting the issue now too. Was fine until today, grabbing a transcript or two every day, but now nothing’s working.

6

I have the same issue.

7

Very sorry about this. It’s not completely unexpected though. As I said when I first announced this feature:

from Easier way to sync YouTube videos (beta) - #14 by Steve

I’ve updated the Firefox extension to version 0.9.30 and so far in my limited testing it seems to work both on YouTube videos with the old style of transcriptions and the new style. Users of the Chrome extension will need to wait for version 0.9.30 of that which I hope should be published early next week.

2 Likes
8

I just tried to follow the steps for the manual way of syncing but the sync is off by a lot.

The submit is successful but if i click on the first letter of the 3rd row ”ま” the video plays form 02:10.

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I also got the new updated add-on and the import worked but the issue is exactly the same with both workflows.

9

New version works great for me, thanks @Steve!

10

I’m new to Readlang, but the same is true for me. It’s way off.

11

Thanks for the fix. It works on many videos, but there’s something going on on the youtube side that affects some other videos. In those failure cases, even if I set the CC language to my target language and the captions on the video show up in that language, the transcript itself is in English and thus unfortunately gets imported into readlang in English. I can force the transcript to be in my target language via the youtube global setting for display language (so all the boilerplate is in the language too), but then unfortunately readlang fails to extract the transcript with the same error message (the transcript is there on the page, though now not called “Transcript” with the English word, if that matters). If I were guessing, when the transcript is autogenerated there’s no problem, but when the creator provides an English transcript, it somehow gets precedence, and youtube ignores the subtitle setting. Not 100% sure of that though.