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When using a video in an H5P video activity, the video's original closed captions won't show in H5P's video player. In most cases, this problem can be fixed manually. This article will help you create a VTT captions file that you can add to your H5P video activities.
Closed captions are usually stored in a plain text format, like SRT or VTT. You can use a copy of the original video captions file to create a new captions file for the H5P activity.
Identifying the original video being used in H5P
First, we need to find the original video that's being used in the H5P activity, so that we can locate it at its original source.
Wherever your original source video file is hosted online (Kaltura, YouTube, Vimeo, etc.), you must be the video's owner/creator in that platform or have the right to edit it and download the captions text file.
In this example, we'll look for a Kaltura video that has previously been embedded into an H5P Video Activity.
In the H5P Interactive Video activity, here's how to find the EntryID of the original Kaltura video (i.e. it's unique identifier inside Kaltura's database):
- In the H5P Interactive Video activity, edit the activity's settings.
- You should be able to find a section that shows the uploaded video (similar to the screen below).
In the text field below, you will see the URL of the video that's currently in use:
- Click into that text field and scroll to the right until you see the characters "entryId/".
Directly after those characters, you will see 10 characters, starting with "0_".
Those ten characters are the unique Kaltura EntryID for the video that's being used in the H5P.
See the highlighted characters in this example:
Copy those characters to your clipboard (right-click copy, Ctrl-C, or Cmd-C). (Don't copy the forward-slash characters, just the ten characters between them.)
You will use that EntryID text in a moment to search Kaltura for the original video.
Finding the original video and downloading its captions
Looking in your Kaltura "My Media" area, you can search for the original video using that Kaltura EntryID, "0_zxzface9".
On the details page of the matching video, hit "Actions >> Edit" to get into the video's properties:
Click on the "Captions" tab, where we can download the captions in SRT format.
Click on the "Download" icon to save the video's original captions as an SRT file:
Save that SRT file somewhere handy, since we'll need it again in a moment...
Converting SRT captions to VTT format
H5P activities require their own captions file, using the WebVTT captions format (aka "VTT").
You must convert the SRT file into a VTT file.
There are a number of free online sites which will help you convert captions files between different formats.
Here's a free site which has worked well:
https://ebby.co/subtitle-tools/converter/srt-to-vtt
Follow the instructions to create a VTT file of your captions. The new file must have a file extension of ".vtt".
Uploading VTT captions into your H5P activity
Once you have the new VTT captions file, it must be uploaded into your H5P interactive video activity.
Edit the settings of the H5P interactive video, and scroll down until you can expand the "Text Tracks" section.
In there, set the "Type of text track" to "Captions", and click "Add" to upload your VTT file.
You can select your VTT file from the file dialogue box that appears:
With that VTT uploaded, scroll further down in the H5P activity and click the "Done" button to save the captions changes.
Then, at the very bottom of the page, click "Save and Display" to save the whole H5P activity and preview it.
Now, when you play the video, you should see closed captions displaying.