I had planned to write about MSG2 and level design today, but I got sidetracked in my mission to find a tangential rant by (Super Bunnyhop). I saw this on his live stream a few months ago and thought it was such an interesting statement that I’ve been thinking about it a lot. However, that too is a topic for another day.
Instead, I want to talk about the clip itself, the mp4 file you see render on this page. I’ve been using yt-dlp a fair bit recently to save videos from youtube, mostly from no-commentary gameplay videos, capturing some interesting design elements. I mostly use it to share privately with my collaborators. While I could have (linked a YouTube video with a timestamp), so much YouTube content has been lost over the years. My “Liked” video playlist on YouTube is 30% broken links, which is frustrating.
I’ve expanded a bit on the typical yt-dlp download command and wrote a segment downloader as a PowerShell script.
It’s really useful since most of the time, I’m only interested in a small clip and don’t want to download a full 5-hour video.
You’ll need to adjust these parameters:
YOUTUBE_LINK = "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQD-wjeFr10"START_TIME = "00:29:22"END_TIME = "00:30:10"
To generate subtitles, I saw today as an opportunity to learn how some of these new AI transcription tools work. OpenAI has released Whisper (GitHub link), an open-source “general-purpose speech recognition model” that can be run locally.
I ended up using WhisperX (GitHub link), a fork that is supposedly a slimmer versi)on. I just ran the command as listed in the GitHub setup. It had to install a lot of packages, but in the end, it worked great. I gave it the segmented YouTube video, and it generated an SRT file with a perfect transcript.
I then used ffmpeg to convert that into a VTT file (full transcript), and that’s what you see above.
There are some ethical considerations here, I’m grabbing this clip without permission and rebublishing it on my blog even if I credit the creator it’s a bit iffy and I’ll probalbly need to reconsider this post of this page ever become more than a personal log.