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Programmatic access to transcript or closed caption text

Terianne HallTerianne Hall Tyro
in API

My university uses the Panopto captioning feature, as well as a third party (depending on the department) to make sure videos are accessible.

I was wondering if anyone knows of a way to programmatically access this text data, perhaps via an API? (I did not immediately see it in the documentation).

I would be interested to know if I could download it, as well as if I could search it?

Thank you in advance for any ideas.

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Best Answers

  • Kevin BaumKevin Baum Panopto Employee
    Answer ✓

    Hi Terianne,

    Our public REST API will return a link to download captions when you call the endpoint to retrieve a session (http://demo.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/api/docs/index.html#/Sessions/Sessions_GetSessionById). That link should be available if the session has captions in it but would be blank if a session does not have captions.

    We don't have a way to search captions specifically through our API currently, however, our Session Search endpoint (http://demo.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/api/docs/index.html#/Sessions/Sessions_SearchForSessions) will return sessions that contain the search query in the captions, as well as in the session name or description.

    I hope this helps. Please let me know if you have any other questions.

    Thanks,

    Kevin

  • Kevin BaumKevin Baum Panopto Employee
    Answer ✓

    Hi Terianne,

    Yes, you are correct. The Session Search endpoint will search similar to the global search on the Panopto site, including name, description, captions, or text (such as Powerpoint slides) in the video.

    Regarding searching captions, the time codes aren't part of the caption data that we search, we only search the caption text. In your example, we would find "data wrangling" since "04:05" isn't part of the caption, but just tells us when to display it.

    Please let me know if you have any other questions that I can help you with.

    Thanks,

    Kevin

Answers

  • Terianne HallTerianne Hall Tyro

    Thank you Kevin, this is helpful.

    For your second point, restating to make sure I understand: The Session Search endpoint searches captions, name AND description for the keywords (i.e. not specifically captions). If so, that's great news, thank you.

    And to clarify, it seems like the captions in Panopto have the time codes, these endpoints are able to deal with that? (e.g. if a search is "data wrangling" it would know to return videos with a caption file like "data 04:05 wrangling"?)

  • Terianne HallTerianne Hall Tyro

    Nope, this is great, thank you!!

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