Support for NFB (National Film Board of Canada) video subtitles

[fturco]

I successfully downloaded this video from the NFB (National Film Board of Canada), but after that I was unable to download the subtitles with --write-sub --skip-download. The command successfully exits, but no subtitles are saved. I'm using youtude-dl version 2014.05.05.

[dstftw]

Thanks for the report.
Unfortunately, NFB delivers subtitles embedded into RTMP stream thus making it impossible to download them as plain text.
However, you can now extract stream with subtitles by explicitly providing a proper format (e.g. for your link): youtube-dl https://www.nfb.ca/film/strangest_dream -f closeCaptioned-480p.
This will be available in the next release of youtube-dl.

[phihag]

Added in youtube-dl 2014.05.13. Type youtube-dl -U to update.

[fturco]

I just updated youtube-dl to version 2014.05.13, but I still can't download subtitles. I tried with both youtube-dl https://www.nfb.ca/film/strangest_dream -f closeCaptioned-480p and youtube-dl https://www.nfb.ca/film/strangest_dream -f closeCaptioned-480p --write-sub --skip-download. No subtitles are saved. Am I missing something?

[ghost]

@fturco subtitles are hardcoded in the video.

[fturco]

@pulpe It's strange, as I just get the video without subtitles, not even hardcoded...

[dstftw]

You can grep the file for onTextData to ensure if there are any captions embedded.

$ youtube-dl https://www.nfb.ca/film/strangest_dream -f closeCaptioned-480p
[nfb] strangest_dream: Downloading film page
[nfb] strangest_dream: Downloading player config XML
[download] Destination: The Strangest Dream-strangest_dream.mp4
[download]   1.1% of ~670.02MiB at 159.74KiB/s ETA 01:32:27^C
$ grep -a "onTextData" "The Strangest Dream-strangest_dream.mp4.part"
onTextDattrackid�text�%WOMAN
onTextDattrackid�text�&wanted to show the
onTextDattrackid�text��It's a place you only get to

[fturco]

Yes, I can now see subtitles with grep. But it seems to me that there are no timestamps, so I cannot copy and paste them to a valid .srt file.