Is there a way to keep captions in Zoom videos that I save to Google Drive?

[CarrieH]

I run a nonprofit here in the U.S. and due to cost constraints, we decided to go with Google Workspace for Nonprofits. Because we're an autistic run organization, autistic people have auditory processing issues and often need captions.

Because Google Workspace for nonprofits - recorded Google Meets isn't part of the plan, we'd have to upgrade to Business Standard or Business Plus, and have been using Zoom for our meetings. Zoom also costs money, but we're forced to use that since we can record with captions. But we'll run out of space to store our zoom meetings on their cloud drive, and it'd be great to move those videos over to Google Drive. The issue is that the captions don't stay with the video once I move it off zoom (it's literally a separate .vtt/text file).

If Google Meets recording was available as an add-on (even if we need to pay for it) to Google Workspace for nonprofits, we'd consider, but that's not an option.

Is there a way of migrating Zoom meetings to Google Drive so that the captions stay with the video? I know that when you migrate MS Teams meeting that have captions enabled, the captions stay with the file (MSFT uses different technology) once it moves over. 

Ideas? I'm sure that other companies/nonprofits that work with people with disabilities have come across this issue (and ADA/WCAG compliance)

Thanks

Carrie

[KAM]

@CarrieH My colleague, Mike Simon, has done some interesting work related to this.  For example, he used ffmpeg to extract the audio in mono from the video, copied it to a Google Cloud Storage audio bucket, used a script to call an transcription API via curl and reference the WAV file in the bucket, to get things automatically.  Happy to post more if it might be of interest.  I'll also mention that Gemini will likely have features that let you do things like this more readily too but I imagine if licensing with Meet for recording was too expensive, then Gemini will definitely be too much.  -KAM

[CarrieH]

What I've done is download the zoom videos, and convert the caption .vtt files to .srt and then use Camtasia to burn the captions into the .mp4 file. Then I would upload it to Google Drive.

Although this technically isn't supported, it seems to work, just extra effort involved with converting the vtt files to srt and then remastering the video with the captions burned into the video. I pay for Camtasia out of my own pocket, so I guess I'm making use of it. I dunno if your solution might be more difficult than the workaround I'm using. (both require additional steps)

Thanks for responding

It's really about proprietary file extensions for subtitling vs caption files. Subtitles, which is supported by Google have the .srt file extension, and caption files are usually .vtt extension, which is what zoom uses - isn't supported by Google and Camtasia (Camtasia prefers .srt files)

As for being able record calls using Meets, we'd have to upgrade our plan to Business Standard or to Standard plus, and recorded Meet calls is included. It's not included for Google Workspace for Nonprofits. 

[KAM]

Sounds like half a dozen, 6 of the other between the solutions.  You might put in a feature request for Zoom to do srt files. -KAM

[CarrieH]

Actually it's .vtt files that Google doesn't support. Zoom uses .vtt for captions