I've been looking into learning Korean lately, and thinking about getting a drama transcribed. I just took a look at Viki and I was pleasantly surprised to see so many Korean dramas with Korean subtitles. I only looked at 2, but both had 80%+ Korean subtitles, and I saw 100% everywhere I spot-checked. That's good news, but I have some questions and comments regarding Viki. Actually, I've had some of these for a while now. I know they have discussions over there, but they are somewhat disorganized imo. 1) Why are videos constantly disappearing? This isn't an exaggeration - over the years more than half of the shows I started to watch have gone away before I could finish. 2) What's with all the ads and super hard sell pay subscription? If I get a subscription does that guarantee my show won't disappear? 3) Can someone who works on subtitles make a copy of the whole file for his personal use? 4) If videos are gone, will Viki share their subtitles with its members? I can usually find the videos somewhere online for free. If Viki isn't going to use the subtitles, why not share them? I actually don't mind paying a monthly subscription if I'm going to use it often, but Viki is so unstable I hesitate.
I think the way it works is that fans upload the videos to YouTube and subtitle them. The copyright owner then sends a complaint to YouTube and the video gets pulled. As far as I understand it a subscription doesn't help with the content being available and I don't think anyone gets access to the subtitles. More annoying is if the video gets yanked you can't get the subtitles any more. In theory it should be a great resource to use but you can never tell if an series is missing an episode or an episode is a part when it's split which makes it a frustrating experience.
I wrote a program to do download all the episode for a series with their subtitles previously but it seems they've changed the way their site works which has broken my program. But if you just want the subtitles you need to do the following: 1. Enable developer tools in your browser. 2. Open up the web inspector. In Chrome it's Ctrl+Shift+i and click on the Network tab. It'll look something like this. 3. Go to an episode, for example http://www.viki.com/videos/1026409v-my-love-from-the-star-episode-1 4. The network tab in the web inspector should start listing lots of names etc as it starts loading content. Once the video starts playing you can pause it. 5. In that list of names you need to find ko.srt (or en.srt for English etc, the little box is a filter so just type it in there) and click on the name, on the right side of the screen change the selection to Response. 6. You can just then copy the response text into a normal text file Here's what it should look like: .
Good tip. Also always a good idea to download Youtube videos as you encounter them if they seem important. What a sinking feeling to sometimes see years of someone's uploading madness suddenly disappear, account closed, it happens. I get copyright. Wish some universal adjudicated fair system of payment would catch on. Was thinking -- the original Napster got shut down and neutered, but Youtube is a more reliable resource for the audio I want than Napster ever was and yet Youtube is unstoppable. WTF ?
Have you got a similar procedure for Safari/OS X? I can google it, but thought you might already know the answer
Safari is basically the same as Chrome. I think it's in Preferences -> Advanced -> Enable Developer Tools You'll get a new menu option called Developer Tools and from there you can select the Web Inspector. It'll look almost the same as the one in the graphic above. Just make sure you first open the web inspector before browsing to the episode (or reload the page) because you need the log of the network activity.
I thought Viki did it all on their own platform...? Anyway, Viki claim to license the material, so Big_Dog's story of disappearing content is a little perplexing....
The reason is he's talking over years. It may be the case they license content now but a couple of years ago it wasn't so. They just used the YouTube API to embed the videos on their site and add the extra subtitle stuff to it. You could actually go to YouTube and watch the video their instead which is why they split episodes into 10 minute sections because YouTube had a 10 minute limit. Looking at it now again it seems they may host the content themselves so perhaps the situation is slightly better.
It looks like they've stopped using youtube, at least for the videos I checked out. But this was a recent phenomenon. Just last month I was watching a series that was on youtube, and has now been removed. The videos haven't been replaced. Maybe there is a plan to move them to their own servers in the future … who knows.
Licenses can expire and not be renewed. I subscribe to Amazon Prime and sometimes shows which are free as part of the subscription revert back to paid, or are even removed entirely. Hence my advice to get all you can get while you can get it, in the thread: the impermanence of the net. This applies especially to youtube. For content on youtube that might not be legit, I won't download it, but I will watch it right now while the watching is good (I search weekly for my standard searches). I view German TV shows as fairly fungible within broad categories, but I could see how with other languages there might not be as much material constantly added to be able to maintain such a view. But anything on youtube can be downloaded . . .
OK, so the stuff on YouTube wouldn't have been licensed, and Viki have received a lot of funding and are presumably trying to "go straight", so expect the YouTube stuff to vanish pretty quickly.
