Subtitle editor won't allow time codes to be corrected

[akhirsch]

I have a subtitle script generated from my 5-minute POPL video, and I'm trying to edit it. There are two speakers, so I wanted each what each speaker was saying to be on separate lines, and I wanted words that were heard as two and the split on separate lines to be corrected. (The biggest issue is the word "monad" followed by the word "noninterference". These are technical words, so I'm okay correcting them, but I want them to be correct on the actual subtitles used.)

However, doing this caused two different timestamps to be combined. To fix this, I tried to create another line, but that has the same timestamp. The POPL organizers asked to have at most one line per time stamp, so I'd like to fix it, but I can't. I tried the "restore timecodes" button, but that just mangled the script.

[EdNutting]

Hi Andrew,

Thank you for raising this with us. The transcript editor is a 3rd party component that we are attempting to contribute to and bring up to date. There are a few things, like input validation, that we would like to improve.

Clowdr has to convert between various subtitle standards/formats (for pre-publication, live stream playback and archiving). As a result, it is not possible to reliably split captions over multiple lines in the way you have described. A solution may be possible in the long term, but will require a lot of specialist understanding to make it work with each subtitling standard. We hope to support multi-speaker videos (in particular breakout rooms) at some point (in 2021, if we can achieve it!)

If you need help restoring a previous version of your subtitles for your POPL video, please contact us via [email protected] with the name of the paper you require help with.

With thanks, Ed