In this post, I’m going to show you how you can easily download Facebook captions or subtitles – even if you don’t own the video.
Hey everyone, my name is David from FreelancerInsights.com.
And in this video, I’m going to be showing you how you can easily download Facebook captions or subtitles – even if you don’t own the video or the content.
So basically, what you’re going to need is a video that is closed-captioned.
If you don’t know what’s a closed caption and an open caption video, feel free to sign up for my captioning course from the link below to learn more about captioning and how you can make money captioning videos.
Now, to the matter at hand. What I need to do is I just need to download the caption to a file.
Let’s say I don’t own the video and maybe a client wanted me to make any changes or I wanted to make the changes and pitch to the client because probably they used the automatic transcription provided by Facebook and there are errors in there captioning and all that.
So basically what I need to do is just, I’ll need to select the video that I want.
And I’ll select this video because I know it already has some captions that I’ve put for example purposes.
So I’ll just click on it.
And once it opens, I’ll just pause it.
Narrator: “We are going to explain…”
And you can see already, we have the captions here. And you can see that they are on if I turn them off they go off if I turn them on they come back on.
So basically what I need is this caption stream, and unfortunately, Facebook does not make this easily available for anyone to download.
So I’ll need to inspect the code. Please follow along.
It’s very very simple and nothing to worry about. So I’ll just click on an area that has nothing that can be clicked on and select Inspect.
Or you can also press on Ctrl + Shift + I on your keyboard.
Now, basically we have some code open here, and it’s nothing to worry about because all you need to do is press on Ctrl + F or Command + F on a Mac.
And basically you’ll get this section with the cursor that is flickering and it says “Find by string, selector or XPath”.
And all we need to do is type in the word “captions”.
Now basically, when you type the in the word captions, this will find the caption stream for us or the track that has the captions.
And from this we can see that the track kind is the captions track that is here and it’s in the SRC, that’s a source.
So basically what we need to do is just double click on this. Once you double click on it, it highlights.
Now, this is the link that we need to help us get these caption stream.
From this, so I’ll present Ctrl + C when this is highlighted the way it is. Ctrl + C. And once I press on Ctrl + C or Command + C on a Mac, that means copy.
I’ll open a new tab and press Ctrl + V to paste the link or Command + V if you’re on a Mac and then press on Enter.
Once I press on Enter, my caption track will populate.
So all you need to do is just come and select the section here. And just copy.
Then open a note editing application. For example, I’ll use Notepad.
Just click on it and then Ctrl + V to paste this here and we can see that everything is as we require it to be.
Then we have it and this is the WEBVTT file. It’s the sister to a .SRT file.
So what we need now to do is just click on file, select save as. And we need to save this file in our preferred folder.
I already know the folder where I want to save it and let’s say I’ll see downloading Facebook captions sample .vtt.
So I’ll save it with an extension of .vtt because these is a WEBVTT file and then come and click on the text documents and click on all files. And then the encoding I’ll set it to UTF-8 and click on Save.
Basically, we have downloaded our subtitle file from Facebook and it’s that easy to do it.
So basically the applications or where you can apply this is if a client requires you to download captions from Facebook and they also don’t want to give their credentials, you can easily use this.
Number two, if you wanted to make changes to captions for a particular client that you want to pitch to, you can easily use this method and then send them a correct file that has been edited and made in the correct way.
And finally probably if you wanted to repurpose the captions file into a transcript, into a blog post you can easily use this.
So basically, that’s how you can download Facebook captions or subtitles even if you don’t own the video.
Thank you so much for watching this video, and if you want to learn how to caption videos kindly click on the link below to get a discount to my Getting Started with Video Captioning Course.
Thank you so much for watching until next time.
Bye. Bye.
The only requirement is that the Facebook video needs to have closed captions available.
Get my Captioning course at a Discount.
https://bit.ly/VideoCaptioningCourse
Enjoy!