Hi I’ve been trying to import Youtube videos, but now since the majority of them have automated captions, this LingQ function is not working anymore. This is really unfortunate, because it provided a ton of reading and listening content.
Would anybody be able to fix this?
Same here. I’ve been trying to import YT videos in several languages - no luck. Is it now a permanent feature that we can’t do it, when there are only automatically created subtitles ? It was still working just fine just two weeks ago…
I’m still having the same problem too. It would be good to know a timeline for the fix since LingQ is basically useless to me without this feature, as almost all videos I want to import have autogenerated subtitles. It is a shame LingQ disables key features all the time but still expects you to pay. It’s extremely unethical.
The only work-around I’ve found is by installing NoteGPT (you need to be registered with Open Source Chat GPT. That summarize the video but prior to that will give you the entire transcript of it. You can copy/paste it and import it. It unfortunatelly won’t have the original video but you’ll need to generate audio, which now also sometimes does not work, or only gives audio for 30 seconds.
Too bad, I love this platform, and I hope they resolve the issues.
I’ve written to them and ask them if there will be a refund and ask that automatic renewal which for me is due any day is removed, and they answer anything else and just ignore this one.
I asked our team what is the status here and will post an update as soon as I hear back.
Thank you zoran.
I appreciate it
Sorry to hear the auto generated import bug is persisting. Is this on the app or on the web?
Importing from YoutubeUrls works again as of a couple days ago on the web, my guess is there is some further bug with the new transcription feature.
This is the log from my Auto generated video import through my free playlist import extension.
You can download my playlist importer for free here
I will preface that I’ve been using Lingq for about a week now, so I’m still a new user and still figuring out all the features. I didn’t know that the inability to import Youtube with autogenerated subtitles was a bug until I saw it here on the forums, I just thought that this is how this feature usually works and was a known limitation. Anyway, I’ve been able to import the YouTube videos without issues using a rather manual process. I first copy the YouTube URL and then extract the mp3 audio using youtube-dl in the command line. I then import the audio into Lingq and have it automatically transcribe the audio as a lesson. I then update the created lesson and paste the Youtube URL in the video field. When I play it on Lingq, everything seems to be in sync. I only import/watch/study a couple of videos a day, so the process has been working fine for me. But, it does take a few minutes to go through these steps per video, so it’s not an instant thing. Good luck
Having the same issue. Worked fine a few weeks ago and now I get the same error about no appropriate subtitles, even though I’ve had no problem importing videos from the same uploader for nearly a year. Very frustrating, hope this is addressed soon as Lingq is much less useful without this feature and probably not worth my money.
Same issue here, That’s really frustrating and the issue has to be fixed.
Thanks for the investigation.
The Chrome extension works on YouTube videos that have a closed caption. It doesn’t, however, work on YouTube videos where the translation is auto-generated. The workaround I use is to record the YouTube audio with a program like Audacity and load that into the lesson you are building. Also, load the YouTube video into the video, then click the GENERATE AUTOMATIC TRANSCRIPT button and let the program do its work.
It is good to know that, there is a way to import videos another way, but we pay subscrption to have this functionality. We were not informed that we won’t be able to use it anymore, as we used to do just weeks ago…
I’m having the same issue, would really like to know when this will be resolved.
If I recall correctly LingQ’s policy used to be that you’re not really supposed to be able to import auto-generated subtitles, as they are typically atrocious in quality. It may have only worked by accident.
If you really want the auto-generated subtitles, you could just use one of the countless websites that offer downloading YouTube subtitles, like this one: https://downsub.com/
Or if you’re comfortable with the command line or programming you could just use GitHub - yt-dlp/yt-dlp: A youtube-dl fork with additional features and fixes
It worked previously and it should definetly work in the future. The users themselves should decide if they want to import content with auto-generated subtitles or not.
And in my experience, auto-generate subtitles are generally pretty good.
Thank you! It worked!
The link you posted immediately alarms my antivirus software. Very trustworthy.
So before I set up a Virtual machine to download audio or record the audio in a daw and then render it or install a python IDE to download audio, it would be much easier to just import it.
It is worth accepting a worse automatic transcript if you can find easier content.
I still cant import anything, includling videos i previously successfully imported. Really frustrating and waiting for a fix.
@bamboozled Actually, this is what I thought as well, auto-generated subtitles were not importable before, this is why I was surprised to see how many people were using it.
However, I have to say it is more convenient if this possibility exist.
Before I was just converting a Youtube video in audio with countless tools online to do so, and import it in LingQ. With the Whisper automatic option LingQ creates the related transcript.
It would be interesting to know if the self-generated transcript from Youtube (which I suppose is Google translate? Bart?) is better or worse than Whisper. I have never done any test about it.
