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Can't upload VTT caption files
For the past month or so, I have been completely unable to upload .vtt captions files to videos hosted on SharePoint/SP Streams. Every time I try, I receive the following error:
At this point I've attempted to upload multiple caption files on multiple browsers (Edge, Firefox, Chrome, Safari), multiple computers, and two different organizational SharePoint instances - nothing works. Going without captions or using autogenerated (which are also not functioning correctly) isn't an option here either since we have to meet accessibility requirements that require specific caption formatting.
Is there anything that I (or my account permissions) could be doing to cause this, or is it a larger issue with SP Streams in general?
BLayman thanks for taking the time to share your feedback with us, we really value it. Firstly, my apologies on you not being able to upload your VTT file, could I suggest one alternative before opening a support ticket?
Could you please search online for "VTT file validator" and open one of your choosing? In the past I have used Live WebVTT Validator (w3c.github.io) in which you take the content of your VTT and paste it directly in the edit box. It would parse the file and output any potential errors.
The reason I'm suggesting this, is because we actually parse the file for errors prior to uploading the VTT file, but we don't expose those details in the UI. Please let me know how it goes, and thank you again for feedback!
I tried all the solutions above, but updating the Stream to an adjusted version never works. I have done a series of videos during the last year I had problems every time but managed to get it working in the end. This time I am stuck after a few hours of trying. I have all the menus, I verified my vtt file, I tried to replace, delete, upload and any thing I could think of. I tried to make sure my vtt file was broken and that is flagged correctly. I proofed by just changing one letter in the downloaded file, and it still will never update the transcript. The only thing that works is the direct edit of the auto-generated transcript but that is so bad it's not a good base, and it does not allow me to do a proper transcript (such as dividing sentences from different persons into two text sentences) or moving things in time to the correct position.
- RodrigoTarrats
Microsoft
BLayman thanks for taking the time to share your feedback with us, we really value it. Firstly, my apologies on you not being able to upload your VTT file, could I suggest one alternative before opening a support ticket?
Could you please search online for "VTT file validator" and open one of your choosing? In the past I have used Live WebVTT Validator (w3c.github.io) in which you take the content of your VTT and paste it directly in the edit box. It would parse the file and output any potential errors.
The reason I'm suggesting this, is because we actually parse the file for errors prior to uploading the VTT file, but we don't expose those details in the UI. Please let me know how it goes, and thank you again for feedback!
RodrigoTarratsThis did it! Apparently the YouTube default .vtt export adds two lines to the beginning of the .vtt file that the Streams parser doesn't like, and it won't allow the upload (which is interesting since Streams Classic had no issue with that). For anyone else with this issue, your .vtt file needs to start with:
WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:02.164and not
WEBVTT Kind: captions Language: en-US 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:02.164- RodrigoTarrats
BLayman I'm so glad you're finally able to upload your VTTs! I will share your feedback with the team in terms of our VTT parser, and potentially displaying the parser's output in the UI to give more context about the error.
Thanks again for posting and sharing, we love your feedback!
