OBS Closed Captions Plugin

Who can use this feature

Site Admin, Channel Admin, Live Event Operator

Supported features: Live Events

Video Tutorial

OBS Plugin Set Up

  1. Install the “Closed Captioning OBS plugin” from GitHub
    1. For OBS version 27 click on this link
    2. For OBS version 28 click on this link
      1. If you are unsure how to install OBS plugins, click here to learn more
  2. Once you’ve installed the plugin, restart your OBS application if it is open. If not, open it
  3. In the Tools drop down menu, you should now see “Cloud Closed Captions” as an option
  4. Click on it to open up the window; Or you can choose it from your “docks” drop down menu, so you can dock it in the interface
  5. Click the cog symbol in the bottom right of the dock to bring up the caption settings window
  6. Check the box for “Captioning Enabled”
  7. Complete all of the recommended settings in the next section below
  8. Do not click save until after configuring the last section 'Text Filtering'

Recommended Settings

General

  • Caption Source: The microphone you will be speaking into is recommended to be a dedicated microphone source and not an already premixed channel with more than just voice coming through it. 
    • Add another “Audio Input Capture” Source to your scenes and select a dedicated microphone channel. Then in the audio mixer, slide the volume of the new input all the way down, but do not click the mute button
  • Caption when: Mute source is heard on stream
  • Mute source: Select the same microphone source as above
  • Language:  Select the language you would like to see the captions in.
  • Profanity Filter: On
  • Output to: Streams & Local Recordings
  • Lines: 3
  • Add Punctuation: checked
  • Capitalization: Normal English like.
  • Force Linebreaks: checked
  • Caption Timeout: checked, and set to a value of 15.0

Transcripts

This plugin allows you to generate .srt subtitle file from your live stream, and it's free!

The subtitles feature is currently supported on video containers only

  • Save Transcripts: checked
  • Save For: Streams - checked. Recordings - checked
  • Format: SubRip Subtitle (.srt)
  • Transcript Folder: select a folder you would like the transcript file to be saved to.
  • Transcript Filenames: Leave all as default or select “Custom Name” from the drop-down menu.
  • Preferred Caption Duration: 8 secs, or your preference
  • Max Line Length: 44 characters, or your preference
  • Capitalization: Normal English like.
  • Add Punctuation: checked
  • Split sentences Longer Than Preferred Duration: unchecked

Open Captions

Recommended to leave these as disabled. While this feature would allow the operator to overlay the captions themselves within their scenes by the live captions being instantly exported to a text file, and using that text file as a source within an OBS scene, it has yielded drops in frame rate, frames missed due to rendering lag, and skipped frames due to encoding lag. Use with caution and run a few tests to see if it works with your live stream set up.

Text Filtering

Here, you can add custom word replacements if you need to.

Don't forget to click save!

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