THE BLACKCAT Subtitles Studio

# THE BLACKCAT Subtitles Studio

## Purpose

Auto-subtitle a video. Drop a video, press one button, and get back the `.srt`
subtitle file plus a copy of the video with the captions burned in. Ideal for
interviews, reels, country stories and any clip that needs quick captions.

## Engine

Fully local and free:

- **FFmpeg** extracts a 16k mono WAV and, when burning is on, renders the
  captions into the video (white text, black outline, bottom-centered).
- **Whisper** (whisper.cpp / `whisper-cli`, Metal-accelerated) transcribes the
  audio to SRT. The model is auto-detected from disk (prefers a multilingual
  model like `ggml-large-v3-turbo`, falls back to `tiny`); if no model is found
  it downloads a small `ggml-base` model into `models/` (git-ignored) once.

## Launch

```bash
scripts/open-subtitles-studio.command
```

Then open `http://127.0.0.1:8777`.

## Usage

1. Drag a video onto the dropzone (or pick one already loaded). MP4, MOV, M4V,
   MKV, WEBM.
2. Optional, under **Avanzado**: pick the language (Automatic / Spanish /
   English) and toggle "Quemar los subtitulos en el video" (on by default).
3. Press **"Subtitular"**. When it finishes, download the SRT, download the
   burned-in video, or open the output folder.

## Privacy

Fully offline: the client video is processed on this Mac and never leaves it.
Input videos and generated SRT/MP4 live in `input/` and `output/`, both
git-ignored. Nothing is uploaded to any cloud service.

## Notes

- Requires `whisper-cli` (`brew install whisper-cpp`) and `ffmpeg` on PATH.
- Longer videos take longer: Whisper runs locally, so a several-minute clip on
  a large model can take a couple of minutes.