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Display transcripts on the website

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe

Castopod is only dealing with transcript as closed captioning, with srt files. I guess this is a good feature to have if the user’s podcast player support it (which is probably a minority of listeners, even Castopod’s own player does not support it!)

Another useful use of transcripts is, not closed captioning, but a readable text without (much) timecode data. It’s great to quickly read and search though the content. And it should be displayed on the website, on the episode’s page. There is a recent post on Castopod’s blog on how great transcript are for SEO, but does it really works well if the transcript is only in the form of an srt hidden in the RSS feed? Maybe it is, I don’t know how SEO work, my undeducated guess would be that it would work better if the transcript was actually shown on the webpage. And that way, any listener of the podcast could easily find it online.

Describe the solution you'd like

It would be nice to have the transcript displayed on the episode page on the website. Below the player, there is already an “Episode description” section. There could be an other section called “Transcript” where the transcript would be.

It seems inconvenient to try to display the transcript that was given as an srt file, because it is a format with lots of line breaks. I’m thinking the best solution would be to use the HTML format of the podcast 2.0 spec (example here), and then the website would parse this HTML to format it simply. This would mean uploading a .html file transcript besides the .srt file (both would serve different purposes).

I’m thinking something like this, but someone who actually knows how to do web design can do better. It should be enough to convey the idea though:

Interface example

Describe alternatives you've considered

I tried many way to display the transcript on the website, but I could not find any. All of those things are not possible currently, but could be alternative solutions (though less good):

  • srt are not displayed on the website
  • There are no way to add a custom content on a episode page. There is only the "description" block, but that is the one that goes on the rss feed. I’d like something more to show on the website pag.
  • There is no way to create (lots of) custom pages on the website. I could make custom pages with the transcripts and there add a link to them in the page description, but the custom pages on castopod are very limited (you can’t have folders, and they all are displayed on the bottom right of the website)