Premium and Enterprise members can enable automated closed captions for their recurring virtual events during the setup process, allowing your content to be more accessible to your audience.
⚠️Note: This feature is currently not available for one-time events or with the browser-based encoder. Captions are only supported when streaming with a third-party encoder via RTMP.
When you create a recurring event, navigate through the setup process until you get to the Live Preview page, where you can select the Auto CC tab on the left side.
Closed captions will be disabled by default. Click the toggle switch to enable automatic captions for your stream.
The total stream time remaining displayed on this page indicates how long you can have automatic captions active for the duration of your paid membership. The amount granted to you will be refreshed upon membership renewal.
💡Tip: You can toggle Auto CC on and off while your event is live. To conserve caption time allowance, consider toggling it off if there will be long periods of no dialogue during your event.
Premium membership includes 2 hours of automatic captioning per year. If the live stream overflows from the stipulated timeframe, rather than stopping their auto-captions mid-stream at 2 hours, Vimeo allows its Premium users to continue showing auto cc for the duration of that particular stream. Enterprise members are granted 30 hours of captioning time. Any Enterprise members needing more time should contact their account manager for more options.
If you surpass your limit mid-stream, captions will continue to display until you end your stream. After that, you will no longer be able to use automatic closed captions until your membership renews. If you would like to add more hours of automatic captioning to your Premium membership, contact our team to learn about our Enterprise offerings.
Example: This happened with a Premium user streaming an event with an auto cc enabled and the event streamed for 3 hours 58 minutes 39 seconds. But rather than stop their captions mid-stream at 2 hours Vimeo allowed the user to continue showing auto cc for the duration of that particular stream.
The negative figure in the above screenshot represents how much time they went over the 2 hour limit for auto cc.
Below the time remaining indicator is the Enhanced speech detection field, where you can enter up to 50 words, separated by commas, that otherwise may not be automatically detected such as people’s names, your business name, or technical jargon that will be spoken during your event. They will populate below the field for easy tracking.
After this, you can continue setting up your event and go live. Auto captions will display regardless of if your content is from live cameras or a pre-recorded video. Viewers can see the captions by clicking the [CC] button on the bottom of the player.
⚠️Note: Captions will not appear on the low-res preview player on the live preview page. To view your event with captions, open the event’s page on vimeo.com or your embedded player.
Once your event ends and your stream is archived, the automatic captions are saved with the video. You can access them by navigating to the video’s settings > Distribution > Subtitles. Here you can download the WebVTT file of your captions if needed (i.e. if you want to edit them) and upload a new file as you would for any other video on your account.
Additional notes:
- Automatic closed captions default to English, but also support French (FR), Spanish (SP), German (DE), and Portuguese (BR). You can only select one language to caption per event, but you can change it at any point before or during your stream.
- If you are simulcasting, the automatic captions on Vimeo will not appear in your other destinations at this time.
- You can toggle Auto CC on and off while your event is live.