Announcing VTT Embed — Add Captions To Embedded YouTube Videos (And Others)

I frequently want to embed external videos at work, but can’t because they’re uncaptioned or only have auto-captions. I also occasionally want to embed one on my site, but don’t because I don’t want to serve JavaScript or trackers. So, I created a CGI script to embed external videos using HTML’s native <video> element.

It’s currently on Tildegit while Sourcehut is still recovering from the Sourcehut–Codeberg DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack, but you can still contribute even if you can’t make an account on Tildegit (see CONTRIBUTING). It’s now on Sourcehut. I will keep both up though because Sourcehut’s email-based workflow can pretty easily accommodate pull requests using git request-pull, so there’s no reason not to provide that as an option.

I’m pretty excited about this one because I think it’ll actually be useful for people. At the very least, I will definitely get use out of it. It’s also nice because I got the project done in a week and it’s already version 1.0. The only other addition I can think of is making a PHP version if there’s enough demand.

I have a hosted instance if you can’t host your own. If you can, though, that would be appreciated. You can join the Matrix room if you need any support or have any questions. There is also a demo if you’d like to see it in action.