wtf is videosubtitler?

VideoSubtitler is a Windows command line tool that takes a local video or audio file, such as mp4, mp3, wav, or m4a, and produces subtitles in three steps: it transcribes the speech, translates the result into Traditional Chinese, and then burns the translated subtitles directly into a copy of the video. The transcription step uses an open source speech recognition tool called faster whisper and outputs both a timed subtitle file and a plain text file. The translation step converts the text to Traditional Chinese and additionally runs it through a conversion library called OpenCC to make the wording match Taiwan usage rather than mainland Chinese phrasing. The final step uses ffmpeg to hard code the translated subtitles into the video permanently, choosing a Windows system font by default. If you only provide an audio file, the tool automatically creates a plain dark background video first so the subtitles have something to sit on. You can run just one or two of the three steps instead of all of them, which is useful if you want to manually fix a mistake in the recognized text or the translation without redoing the whole process from scratch, since the subtitle files are ordinary text you can edit directly. There are options to control which whisper model size is used, which translation engine to use among a free Google translate option, a paid Claude API option for higher quality, or a plain Chinese conversion only option, plus subtitle styling choices like font, size, color, and position. To set it up you need Windows 10 or 11, Python 3.10 or newer, and ffmpeg, which is not bundled in the project because of its size and must be downloaded separately and placed in a tools folder or added to your system path. The project ships two small sample clips with no copyright concerns so you can try it immediately without your own footage. The tool currently only processes one file at a time with no batch mode, keeps Whisper's original line breaks which can make some subtitle lines long, only supports permanently burned in subtitles rather than a toggleable subtitle track, and has only been tested on Windows. The project is released under the MIT license, while noting that ffmpeg itself carries its own separate license terms.