If you use a live captioning service to send live captions with the video stream, then we have good news for you. The captions will be automatically extracted from the stream and converted into a sidecar file that you can use with the recorded version of the live stream. Why is this necessary? We do this so that you can provide automatic translations and downloads of the caption files, as well as a way to edit the captions if needed.

The live captions are sent as a CEA-608/708 data stream along with the video stream. The streaming server takes these streams and combines them (“muxing”) so that the player can display the captions with the video. The resulting file is inspected by us and if embedded captions are found, we extract them and save them as a WebVTT file. By default they are unpublished and will require your approval to publish them and make them visible to users.

The captions will be available in the caption editor for review, editing and approval. They will carry the same formatting as the original CEA-608/708 stream, so if you see text in all caps, that’s where it came from.