youtube-to-praat

This is a Python 3 script which takes in a link to a YouTube video, or a number of YouTube video links and downloads both the audio and the automatically generated captions for them. These captions are then used to create a Praat TextGrid of utterances, which is turned forced aligned with the Montreal Forced Aligner.

Currently it only uses the auto-generated subtitles on YouTube videos rather than hand-written subtitles.

Getting Started

Installing

In order to run the script you must first run pip install -r requirements.txt to install all necessary Python packages. You should also have a version of FFmpeg installed and available on the PATH as well. Additionally, if you intend to use the Montreal Forced Aligner with it, you must change the MFA_BIN variable in download.py to the path to the directory of mfa_align on your system.

Using the script

The simplest use-case is to download one YouTube video and forced-align it. This requires that you have set the MFA_BIN variable in the script.

python3 download.py https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmIxrpI8-4M

You can also provide multiple videos, or even a link to a playlist(since YouTube playlist links contain an ampersand, make sure that you surround the link in quotes).

python3 download.py https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MsNyR-epBM "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wetwETy4u0&list=PLA34681B9BE88F5AA"

Finally you can also provide a file with a list of youtube links seperated by newlines like so:

python3 download.py --file_path youtube_videos.txt

You can also include video links as arguments and as a file at the same time.

Script details

Files are named like so user_id.video_id.ext. TextGrid tiers use this user as the speaker for the video(since youtube's auto-subtitles don't distinguish between speakers).

If a video does not have automatic captions, the audio file will still be downloaded, but nothing will be done with it.

More options can be accessed by running python3 download.py -h

Languages other than English

By default, youtube-dl will always download the English subtitles, and if there are none it will auto-translate the subtitles into English, and download this. In order to circumvent this, if you want to use another language, you must provide the --language flag with the two letter code of the language you intend to use(e.g. en for English, fr for French, and so on).

If you intend to use this with the MFA step, make sure that you also change the pronunciation dictionary and the alignment model as well.

Author

• Michael Goodale

License

This project is licensed under the GPL v3 License - see the LICENSE file for details