Is it possible to keep youtube videos AND their stylish captions for myself offline?
The thumbnail image is a screenshot from a Youtube video, for a song. the lyrics in gold color are Youtube closed captions, they look cool and stylish right? This is common in videos of 4K scaled anime openings. Can I get these offline? I know I can download videos using yt-dlp, and include subtitles in the container using the --embed-subs flag, I think you can also download subtitle files in vtt extension, but VLC can't read them I think.
I didn't include a link cuz it might become a hustle for dbzer0, but since some are asking here you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXzoiiZo5LA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StLX4kITjWU
there were better ones (Kaguya-sama openings) but I can't find them anymore on Youtube, stupid copyrights, thus my obsession of hoarding what I like
Update: @Majestic@lemmy.ml provided the solution,
1- download the subtitle file in vtt format using yt-dlp:
yt-dlp --skip-download --embed-subs https://youtu.be/5i3pX-2NLKk?si=waYB6Jv4d6gxsVuh
2- use Subtitle Edit's batch converter tool to convert the vtt file into .ass format
3- now just import it on VLC while watching your downloaded video, the subtitles will appear in the same styling as on Youtube, additionally you can embed them to the video container using ffmpeg
Open the web subtitles in subtitleedit. Change format to ass (advanced substation alpha). Save and re-embed using mkvtoolnix.
Positioning of multiple lines works well with ass and VLC shouldn’t have an issue reading and displaying. Not sure if YouTube includes the positioning data in their subtitles though. You could recreate that in subtitle edit (free software btw, dk web domain I believe) but it would be a bit of an annoyance.
edit: Corrected domain name. Not German, but nikse is it as OP has suggested
this is the software ?
Yes. It’s incredibly powerful but easy to use for a basic purpose like editing a line or converting formats.
update: It worked perfectly! I first tried some online converters but their produced .ass files didn't have even colors. but when I tried subtitle edit (on my brother's computer cuz I don't have Windows) the produced subtitles where exactly the same as in Youtube!