video/.claude/skills/remotion-best-practices/rules/transcribe-captions.md

name, description, metadata

name	description	metadata
transcribe-captions	Transcribing audio to generate captions in Remotion	tags captions, transcribe, whisper, audio, speech-to-text

Transcribing audio

To transcribe audio to generate captions in Remotion, you can use the transcribe() function from the @remotion/install-whisper-cpp package.

Prerequisites

First, the @remotion/install-whisper-cpp package needs to be installed. If it is not installed, use the following command:

npx remotion add @remotion/install-whisper-cpp

Transcribing

Make a Node.js script to download Whisper.cpp and a model, and transcribe the audio.

import path from "path";
import {
  downloadWhisperModel,
  installWhisperCpp,
  transcribe,
  toCaptions,
} from "@remotion/install-whisper-cpp";
import fs from "fs";

const to = path.join(process.cwd(), "whisper.cpp");

await installWhisperCpp({
  to,
  version: "1.5.5",
});

await downloadWhisperModel({
  model: "medium.en",
  folder: to,
});

// Convert the audio to a 16KHz wav file first if needed:
// import {execSync} from 'child_process';
// execSync('ffmpeg -i /path/to/audio.mp4 -ar 16000 /path/to/audio.wav -y');

const whisperCppOutput = await transcribe({
  model: "medium.en",
  whisperPath: to,
  whisperCppVersion: "1.5.5",
  inputPath: "/path/to/audio123.wav",
  tokenLevelTimestamps: true,
});

// Optional: Apply our recommended postprocessing
const { captions } = toCaptions({
  whisperCppOutput,
});

// Write it to the public/ folder so it can be fetched from Remotion
fs.writeFileSync("captions123.json", JSON.stringify(captions, null, 2));

Transcribe each clip individually and create multiple JSON files.

See Displaying captions for how to display the captions in Remotion.