I've been experimenting with these default header
args for Org Babel source blocks.
(setq org-babel-default-header-args
'((:session . "none")
(:results . "drawer replace")
(:comments . "link") ;; add a link to the original source
(:exports . "both")
(:cache . "no")
(:eval . "never-export") ;; explicitly evaluate blocks instead of evaluating them during export
(:hlines . "no")
(:tangle . "no"))) ;; I have to explicitly set up blocks for tangling
In particular, :comments link adds a comment
before each source block with a link to the file
it came from. This allows me to quickly jump to
the actual definition. It also lets me use
org-babel-detangle to copy changes back to my
Org file.
I also have a custom link type to make it easier
to link to sections of my configuration file
(Links to my config). Org Mode prompts for the
link type to use when more than one function
returns a link for storing, so that was
interrupting my tangling with lots of interactive
prompts. The following piece of advice ignores all
the custom link types when tangling the link
reference. That way, the link reference always
uses the file: link instead of offering my
custom link types.
[2025-01-02 Thu]: Add numbers based on latest Linode invoice.
[2024-12-28 Sat]: Added talk and Q&A count, added note about BBB max simultaneous users, added note about BBB, added thanks
The videos have been uploaded, thank-you notes
have been sent, and the kiddo has decided to play
a little Minecraft on her own, so now I get to
write some quick notes on EmacsConf 2024.
peak 81.54% total CPU (100% is 12 CPUs); each OBS ~250%), mem 7GB used
media
3GB 1core
YouTube livestream stats:
Shift
Peak
Avg
Gen Sat AM
46
28
Gen Sat PM
24
16
Dev Sat AM
15
7
Dev Sat PM
20
12
Gen Sun AM
28
17
Gen Sun PM
26
18
Timeline
Call for proposals
[2024-06-30 Sun]
CFP deadline
[2024-09-20 Fri]
Speaker notifications
[2024-09-27 Fri]
Publish schedule
[2024-10-25 Fri]
Video target date
[2024-11-08 Fri]
EmacsConf
[2024-12-07 Sat]-[2024-12-07 Sat]
We did early acceptances again this year. That was
nice. I wasn't sure about committing longer
periods of time early in the scheduling process,
so I usually tried to nudge people to plan a
20-minute video with the option of possibly doing
more, and I okayed longer talks once we figured
out what the schedule looked like.
There were 82 days between the call for proposals
and the CFP deadline, another 49 days from that to
the video target date, and 29 days between the
video target date and EmacsConf. It felt like
there was a good amount of time for proposals and
videos. Six videos came in before or on the target
date. The rest trickled in afterwards, which was
fine because we wanted to keep things low-pressure
for the speakers. We had enough capacity to
process and caption the videos as they came in.
Data
We continued to use an Org file to store the talk information.
It would be great to add some validation functions:
Check permissions and ownership for files
Check case sensitivity for Q&A type detection
Check BBB redirect pages to make sure they exist
Check transcripts for ` because that messes up formatting;
consider escaping for the wiki
Check files are public and readable
Check captioned by comment vs caption status vs captioner
Speakers uploaded their files via PsiTransfer
again. I didn't get around to setting up the FTP
server. I should probably rename
ftp-upload.emacsconf.org to upload.emacsconf.org
so that people don't get confused.
For communicating with speakers and volunteers, I
used lots of mail merge
(emacsconf-mail.el). Most of the
templates only needed a little tweaking from last
year's code. I added a function to help me
double-check delivery, since the batches that I
tried to send via async sometimes ran into errors.
Next time, I think it could be interesting to add
more blog posts and Mastodon toots.
Also, maybe it would be good to get in touch with podcasts like
to give a heads up on EmacsConf before it
happens and also let them know when videos are
available.
We continued to use Mumble for backstage coordination. It worked out well.
Schedule
The schedule worked out to two days of talks, with
two tracks on the first day, and about 15-20
minutes between each talk. We were able to adapt
to late submissions, last-minute cancellations,
and last-minute switches from Q&A to live.
We added an open mic session on Sunday to fill in
the time from a last-minute cancellation. That
worked out nicely and it might be a good idea to
schedule in that time next year. It was also good
to move some of the usual closing remarks earlier.
We were able to wrap up in a timely manner, which
was great for some hosts and participants because
they didn't have to stay up so late.
Sunday was single-track, so it was nice and
relaxed. I was a little worried that people might
get bored if the current talk wasn't relevant to
their interests, but everyone managed just fine. I
probably should have remembered that Emacs people
are good at turning extra time into more
configuration tweaks.
Most of the scheduling was determined by people's
time constraints, so I didn't worry too much about
making the talks flow logically. I accidentally
forgot to note down one speaker's time
constraints, but he caught it when we e-mailed the
draft schedule and I was able to move things
around for a better time for him.
There was a tiny bit of technical confusion
because the automated schedule publishing on res
had case-sensitive matching (case-fold-search
was set to nil), so if a talk was set to "Live"
Q&A, it didn't announce it as a live talk because
it was looking for live. Whoops. I've added that
configuration setting to my
emacsconf-stream-config.el, so the ansible
scripts should get it next time.
I asked Leo and Corwin if they wanted to manually
control the talks this year. They opted to leave
it automatically managed by crontab so that they
wouldn't have to worry as much about timekeeping.
It worked reliably. Hooray for automation! The
only scheduling hiccup was because I turned off
the crontab so that we could do Saturday closing
remarks when we wanted to and I forgot to reenable
autopilot the next day. We noticed when the
opening remarks didn't start right on the dot, and
I got everything back on track.
Like last year, I scheduled the dev track to start
a little later than the gen track. That made for a
less frantic morning. Also, this year we scheduled
Sunday morning to start with more IRC Q&A instead
of live Q&A. We didn't notice any bandwidth issues
on Sunday morning this time.
It would be nice to have Javascript countdowns in
some kind of web interface to make it easier for
hosts, especially if we can update it with the
actual time the current video will end in MPV.
I can also update the emacsconf-stream.el code to
make it easier to automatically count down to the
next talk or to a specific talk.
We have Javascript showing local time on the
individual talk pages, but it would be nice to
localize the times on all the schedule/watch pages
too.
Most of my stuff (scheduling, publishing, etc.) is
handled by automation with just a little bit of
manual nudging every so often, so it might be
possible to organize an event that's more friendly
to Europe/APAC timezones.
Recorded videos
As usual, we strongly encouraged speakers to
record videos to lower everyone's stress levels
and allow for captioning by volunteers, so that's
what most speakers did. We were able to handle
a few last-minute submissions as well as a
live talk. Getting videos also meant we could
publish them as each talk went live, including
automatically putting the videos and transcripts
on the wiki.
We didn't have obvious video encoding cut-offs, so
re-encoding in a screen was a reliable way to
avoid interruptions this year. Also, no one
complained about tiny text or low resolution, so
the talk preparation instructions seem to be
working out.
Automatically normalizing the audio with
ffmpeg-normalize didn't work out, so Leo Vivier
did a last-minute scramble to normalize the audio
the day before the conference. Maybe that's
something that volunteers can help with during the
lead-up to the conference, or maybe I can finally
figure out how to fit that into my process. I
don't have much time or patience to listen to
things, but it would be nice to get that sorted
out early.
Next year we can try remixing the audio to mono.
One of the talks had some audio moving around,
which was a little distracting. Also, some people
listen to the talks in one ear, so it would be
good to drop things down to mono for them.
We think 60fps videos stressed the res server a
bit, resulting in dropped frames. Next year, we
can downsample those to 30fps and add a note to
the talk preparation instructions. The hosts also
suggested looking into setting up streaming from
each host's computer instead of using our shared
VNC sessions.
There was some colour smearing and weirdness when
we played some videos with mpv on res. Upgrading
MPV to v0.38 fixed it.
Some people requested dark mode (light text on
dark background), so maybe we can experiment with
recommending that next year.
I did a last-minute change to the shell scripts to
load resources from the cache directory instead of
the assets/stream directory, but I didn't get all
of the file references, so sometimes the test
videos played or the introductions didn't have
captions. On the plus side, I learned how to use
j in MPV to reload a subtitle file.
Sometimes we needed to play the videos manually.
If we get the hang of starting MPV in a screen or
tmux session, it might be easier for hosts to
check how much time is left, or to restart a video
at a specific point if needed. Leo said he'll work
on figuring out the configuration and the Lua
scripts.
I uploaded all the videos to YouTube and scheduled
them. That was nice because then I didn't have to
keep updating things during the conference. It
turns out that Toobnix also has a way to schedule
uploads. I just need to upload it as unlisted
first, and then choose Scheduled from the
visibility. I wonder if peertube-cli can be
extended to schedule things. Anyway, since I
didn't know about that during the conference, I
just used emacsconf-publish-upload-talk function
to upload videos.
We record introductions so that hosts don't have
to worry about how to say things on air. I should
probably send the intro check e-mail
earlier–maybe on the original video target date,
even if speakers haven't submitted their videos
yet. This will reduce the last-minute scramble to
correct intros.
When I switched the shell scripts to use the cache
directory, I forgot to get it to do the intros
from that directory as well, so some of the
uncorrected intros were played.
I forgot to copy the intro VTTs to the cache
directory. This should be handled by the
subed-record process for creating intros, so it'll
be all sorted out next year.
Captioning
We used WhisperX for speech-to-text this year. It
did a great job at preparing the first drafts of
captions that our wonderful army of volunteer
captioners could then edit. WhisperX's built-in
voice activity detection cut down a lot on the
hallucinations that OpenAI Whisper had during
periods of silence in last year's captions, and
there was only one instance of WhisperX missing a
chunk of text from a speaker that I needed to
manually fill in. I upgraded to a Lenovo P52 with
64GB RAM, so I was able to handle last-minute
caption processing on my computer. It might be
handy to have a smaller model ready for those
last-minute requests, or have something ready to
go for the commercial APIs.
The timestamps were a little bit off. It was
really helpful that speakers and volunteers used
the backstage area to check video quality. I used
Aeneas to re-align the text, but Aeneas was also
confused by silences. I've added some code to
subed so that I can realign regions of subtitles
using Aeneas or WhisperX timestamps, and I also
wrote some code to skim timestamps for easy
verification.
Anush V experimented with using machine learning
for subtitle segmentation, so that might be
something to explore going forward.
BigBlueButton web conference
This year we set up a new BigBlueButton web conferencing server. The server with our previous BigBlueButton instance had been donated by a defunct nonprofit, so it finally got removed on October 27. After investigating whether Jitsi or Galene might be a good fit for EmacsConf, we decided to continue with BigBlueButton. There were some concerns about non-free Mongo for BBB versions >= 2.3 and < 3, so I installed BBB 3.0. This was hard to get working on a Docker on the existing res server. We decided it was worth spinning up an additional Linode virtual private server. It turned out that BBB refused to run on anything smaller than 8GB/4core, so I scaled up to that during testing, scaled back down to 1GB/1core in between, and scaled up to 16GB/8core dedicated during the conference.
I'm still not 100% sure I set everything up
correctly or that everything was stable. Maybe
next year BBB 3.0 will be better-tested, someone
more sysad-y can doublecheck the setup, or we can
try Galene.
One of the benefits of upgrading to BBB 3.0 was
that we could use the smart layout feature to drag
the webcam thumbnails to the side of the shared
screen. This made shared screens much easier to
read. I haven't automated this yet, but it was
easy enough for us to do via the shared VNC
session.
On the plus side, it was pretty straightforward to use the Rails console to create all the rooms. We used moderator access codes to give all the speakers moderator access. Mysteriously, superadmins didn't automatically have moderator access to all the rooms even if they were logged in, so we needed to add host access by hand so that they could start the recordings.
Since we self-hosted and were budgeting more for the full-scale node, I didn't feel comfortable scaling it up to production size until a few days before the conference. I sent the access codes with the check-in e-mails to give speakers time to try things out.
(Max number of simultaneous users wasn't deduplicated, since we need that number for server load planning)
Tech checks and hosting
FlowyCoder did a great job getting everyone
checked in, especially once I figured out the
right checklist to use. We used people's emergency
contact information a couple of times.
Corwin and Leo were able to jump in and out of the
different streams for hosting. Sometimes they were
both in the same Q&A session, which made it more
conversational especially when they were covering
for technical issues. We had a couple of crashes
even though the tech checks went fine, so that was
weird. Maybe something's up with BBB 3.0 or how I
set it up.
Next time, we can consider asking speakers what
kind of facilitation style they like. A chatty
host? Someone who focuses on reading the questions
and then gets out of the way? Speakers reading
their own questions and the host focusing on
timekeeping/troubleshooting?
Streaming
I experimented with setting up the live0 streaming
node as a 64GB 32core dedicated CPU server, but
that was overkill, so we went back down to 64GB
16core and it still didn't approach the CPU
limits.
The 480p stream seemed stable, hooray! I had set
it up last year to automatically kick in as soon
as I started streaming to Icecast, and that worked
out. I think I changed a loop to be while true
instead of making it try 5 times, so that probably
helped.
I couldn't get Toobnix livestreaming to work this
year. On the plus side, that meant that I could
use OBS to directly stream to YouTube instead of
trying to set up multicasting. I set up one
YouTube livestreaming event for each shift and
added the RTMP keys to our shift checklists so
that I could update the settings before starting
the stream. That was pretty straightforward.
This year, I wrote a little randomizer function to
display things on the countdown screen. At first I
just dumped in
https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/gnuemacs.acro.exp.en.html,
but some of those were not quite what I was
looking for. (… Probably should've read them all
first!) Then I added random packages from GNU ELPA
and NonGNU ELPA, and that was more fun. I might
add MELPA next time too. The code for dumping
random packages is probably worth putting into a
different blog post, since it's the sort of thing
people might like to add to their dashboards or
screensavers.
I ran into some C-s annoyances in screen even with
flow control turned off, so it might be a good
idea to switch to tmux instead of screen.
Next year, I think it might be a good idea to make
intro images for each talk. Then we can use that
as the opening slide in BigBlueButton (unless
they're already sharing something else) as well as
a video thumbnail.
Publishing
The automated process for publishing talks and
transcripts to the wiki occasionally needed
nudging when someone else had committed a change
to the wiki. I thought I had a git pull in there
somewhere, but maybe I need to look at it some
more.
I forgot to switch the conference publishing phase
and enable the inclusion of Etherpads, but
fortunately Ihor noticed. I did some last-minute
hacking to add them in, and then I remembered the
variables I needed to set. Just need to add it to
our process documentation.
Etherpad
We used Etherpad 1.9.7 to collect Q&A again this
year. I didn't upgrade to Etherpad v2.x because I
couldn't figure out how to get it running within
the time I set aside for it, but maybe that's
something for next year.
I wrote some Elisp to copy the current ERC line
(unwrapped) for easier pasting into Etherpad. That
worked out really well, and it let me keep up with
copying questions from IRC to the pad in between
other bits of running around.
(emacsconf-erc-copy in
emacsconf-erc.el)
Next year, I'll add pronouns and pronunciations to
the Etherpad template so that hosts can refer to
them easily.
If I rejig the template to move the next/previous
links so that notes can be added to the end, I
might be able to use the Etherpad API to add text
from IRC.
IRC
We remembered to give the libera.chat people a
heads-up before the conference, so we didn't run
into usage limits for https://chat.emacsconf.org. Yay!
Aside from writing emacsconf-erc-copy
(emacsconf-erc.el) to make it easier
to add text from IRC to the Etherpad, I didn't
tinker much with the IRC setup for this year. It
continued to be a solid platform for discussion.
I think a keyboard shortcut for inserting a talk's
URL could be handy and should be pretty easy to
add to my Embark keymap.
Extracting the Q&A
We sometimes forgot to start the recording for the
Q&A until a few minutes into the talk. I
considered extracting the Q&A recordings from the
Icecast dump or YouTube stream recordings in order
to get those first few minutes, but decided it
wasn't worth it since people could generally
figure out the answers.
Getting the recordings off BigBlueButton was
easier this year because I configured it with
video as an additional processing format, so we
could grab one file per session instead of
combining the different streams with ffmpeg.
I did a quick pass of the Q&A transcripts and chat
logs to see if people mentioned anything that they
might want to take out. I also copied IRC messages
and the pads, and I copied over the answers from
the transcripts using the new
emacsconf-extract-subed-copy-section-text
function.
Audio mixing was uneven. It might be nice to
figure out separate audio recordings just in case
(#12302, bigbluebutton-dev). We ended up not
tinkering with the audio for the Q&A, so next
time, I can probably upload them without waiting
to see if anyone wants to fiddle with the audio.
Trimming the Q&A was pretty straightforward. I
added a subed-crop-media-file function to subed
so that I can trim files easily.
Thanks to my completion functions for adding
section headings based on comments, it was easy to
index the Q&A this year. I didn't even put it up
backstage for people to work on.
Nudged by @ctietze, I'm experimenting with adding
sticky videos if Javascript is enabled so that
it's easier to navigate using the transcript.
There's still a bit of tinkering to do, but
it's a start.
I added some conference-related variables to a
.dir-locals.el file so that I can more easily
update things even for past conferences. This is
mostly related to publishing the captions on the
wiki pages, which I do with Emacs Lisp.
Budget and donations
Costs (USD, not including 13% tax):
52.54
Extra costs for hosting in December
3.11
Extra costs for BBB testing in November
120
Hosting costs year-round (two Linode nanodes)
Total of USD 175.65 + tax, or USD 198.48 for 2024.
The Free Software Foundation also provided
media.emacsconf.org for serving media files. Ry P
provided res.emacsconf.org for OBS streaming over
VNC sessions.
Amin Bandali was away during the conference
weekend and no one else knew how to get the list
of donors and current donation stats from the FSF
Working Together program on short notice. Next
time, we can get that sorted out beforehand so
that we can thank donors properly.
Documentation and time
I think my biggest challenge was having less time
to prepare for EmacsConf this year because the
kiddo wanted more of my attention. In many ways,
the automation that I'd been gradually building up
paid off. We were able to pull together EmacsConf
even though I had limited focus time.
Here's my Emacs-related time data (including Emacs
News and tweaking my config):
I spent 92.6 hours total in October and November
2024 doing Emacs-related things, compared to 179.8
hours the previous year – so, around half the
time. Part of the 2023 total was related to
preparing my presentation for EmacsConf, so I was
much more familiar with my scripts then.
Apparently, there was still a lot more that I
needed to document. As I scrambled to get
EmacsConf sorted out, I captured quick tasks/notes
for the things I need to add to our organizers
notebook. Now I get to go through all those notes
in my inbox. Maybe next year will be even
smoother.
On the plus side, all the process-related
improvements meant that the other volunteers could
jump in pretty much whenever they wanted,
including during the conference itself. I didn't
want to impose firm commitments on people or bug
them too much by e-mail, so we kept things very
chill in terms of scheduling and planning. If
people were available, we had stuff people could
help with. If people were busy, that was fine, we
could manage. This was nice, especially when I
applied the same sort of chill approach to myself.
I'd like to eventually get to the point of being
able to mostly follow my checklists and notes from
the start of the conference planning process to
the end. I've been moving notes from year-specific
organizer notebooks to the main organizers'
notebook. I plan to keep that one as the main file
for notes and processes, and then to have specific
dates and notes in the yearly ones.
Thanks
Thank you to all the speakers, volunteers, and participants, and to all those other people in our lives who make it possible through time and support.
Thanks to Leo Vivier and Corwin Brust for hosting the sessions, and to FlowyCoder for checking people in.
Thanks to our proposal review volunteers James Howell, JC Helary, and others for helping with the early acceptance process.
Thanks to our captioning volunteers: Mark Lewin, Rodrigo Morales, Anush, annona, and James Howell, and some speakers who captioned their own talks.
Thanks to Leo Vivier for fiddling with the audio to get things nicely synced.
Thanks to volunteers who kept the mailing lists free from spam.
Thanks to Bhavin Gandhi, Christopher Howard, Joseph Turner, and screwlisp for quality-checking.
Thanks to shoshin for the music.
Thanks to Amin Bandali for help with infrastructure and communication.
Thanks to Ry P for the server that we're using for OBS streaming and for processing videos.
Thanks to the Free Software Foundation for Emacs itself, the mailing lists, the media.emacsconf.org server, and handling donations on our behalf through the FSF Working Together program. https://www.fsf.org/working-together/fund
Thanks to the many users and contributers and project teams that create all the awesome free software we use, especially: BigBlueButton, Etherpad, Icecast, OBS, TheLounge, libera.chat, ffmpeg, OpenAI Whisper, WhisperX, the aeneas forced alignment tool, PsiTransfer, subed, and many, many other tools and services we used to prepare and host this years conference
Thanks to everyone!
Overall
Good experience. Lots of fun. I'd love to do it
again next year. EmacsConf feels like a nice, cozy
get-together where people share the cool things
they've been working on and thinking about. People had fun!
They said:
"emacsconf is absolutely knocking it out of the park when it comes to conference logistics"
"I think this conference has defined the terms for a successful online conference."
"EmacsConf is one of the big highlights of my year every year. Thank you a ton for running this 😊"
It's one of the highlights of my year too. =) Looking forward to the next one!
p.s. I'd love to learn from other people's conference blog posts, EmacsConf or otherwise. I'm particularly interested in virtual conferences and how we can tinker with them to make them even better. I'm having a hard time finding posts; please feel free to send me links to ones you've liked or written!
[2024-12-28 Sat]: I got emacstv-queue-random to fill the playlist with shuffled URLs, so it's all good now! =)
I came across Ruby Video on Hacker News and thought it was a good idea, particularly the topic view. I mentioned it in a toot and that seemed to strike a chord in the #emacs community there, so I exported some of the metadata for EmacsConf videos into an Org Mode file. @xenodium whipped up a quick web prototype at emacs.tv. I added a bunch of videos from Emacs News and wrote some code for playing the videos from Emacs, and then grabbed more videos from YouTube playlists and Vimeo search results. (Gotta find a good way to monitor PeerTube…) As of this writing, there are 2785 videos with a combined playtime of more than 1000 hours.
I am, in fact, listening to emacstv-background-mode as I write this. I was listening to it earlier while I played Minecraft with the kiddo. I'll probably shift some of my doomscrolling to shuffling through the emacs.tv web interface on my phone. I love hearing people's enthusiasm, and I occasionally pick up interesting tips along the way. (Gotta steal prot/window-single-toggle…)
It's easy to use little crumbs of time to add more tags to the videos.org file. Sometimes I use org-agenda with buffer restriction (<) and search (s) to mark/unmark (m, u) so that I can bulk-tag (B +). To make this even more convenient, I've added emacstv-agenda-search, emacstv-org-ql-search, and emacstv-org-ql-search-untagged so that I can do that bulk tagging from anywhere.
It would be nice to have mpv reuse the window. I wonder if I can queue up a number of videos instead of doing it one at a time, and if that would do the trick…
When subtitle times are too far off from the video
or audio, people start worrying if their video has
frozen or jumped ahead. It's good to keep
subtitles roughly in time with the audio.
For EmacsConf, we can get timing information from
two places. WhisperX produces a JSON file with
word data in the process of doing the speech
recognition, and the aeneas forced alignment tool
can use synthesized text-to-speech to figure out
the timestamps for each line of text compared to a
media file.
Aeneas timestamps are more helpful once we start
editing, but it can be confused by long silences,
extraneous noises, multiple speakers, and
inaccurate transcripts (words added or removed).
Loading word data requires a pretty close match at
the moment, but since we change only about 4% of
the subtitle text when editing, those cues are
still helpful. (I measured this by the Levenshtein
distance between the combined cue texts of edited
subtitles versus the original WhisperX
transcripts, using string-distance to
approximate the editing percentage.)
To make it easier to correct subtitle timing, I
added a few ways to tweak subtitle timing for a
region of subtitles.
WhisperX:subed-word-data-fix-subtitle-timing in
subed-word-data.el tries to match the word
data from WhisperX against the text of the current
subtitle, using string-distance for approximate
matches. I start at about two words shorter than
what's in the subtitle, and then increase the
number of words taken from the data while the
string distance decreases. I skip the data for
words before the beginning of the first
subtitle in the region.
Screencast of subed-word-data-fix-subtitle-timing
Aeneas:subed-align-region uses Aeneas to realign the
subtitles from the region using the section of the
media file between the start of the first subtitle
and the end of the last subtitle in the region.
When I notice that the times are off, I skim the
subtitles (or just skim them visually) to find the
last well-timed subtitle. Then I pick a subtitle
that's in the incorrectly-timed section. I use
subed-mpv-jump-to-current-subtitle (M-j) to
jump to that position, and I play back that
subtitle. It usually belongs to some text further
down, so I reset to that position with M-j, set
my mark before the previous correctly-timed
subtitle with C-SPC, go to the subtitle that
matches that time, and use
subed-copy-player-pos-to-start-time (C-c [) to
set the proper timestamp. Then I can go to the
previous incorrectly-timed subtitle and use M-x
subed-align-region. This runs the Aeneas forced
alignment tool using just the subtitle text in the
region, the starting timestamp of the first
subtitle, and the ending timestamp of the last
subtitle, making it easy to adjust that section.
subed-align-region is in subed-align.el
Retiming by pressing SPC after each subtitle: As
an experiment, I've also added a
subed-retime-subtitles command that plays
through the subtitles so that I can press SPC
when the next subtitle starts. It begins with the
current subtitle and stops when you press a key
that's not in its keymap.
Screencast with audio: subed-retime-subtitles
Manual adjustments: For fine-tuning timestamps,
I usually turn on subed-waveform-show-all and
shift-left-click
(subed-waveform-set-start-and-copy-to-previous)
or shift-right-click
(subed-waveform-set-stop-and-copy-to-next) on
the waveforms because it's easy to see where the
words and pauses are. When I'm not sure, I can use
middle-click (subed-waveform-play-sample) to
play part of the file without changing the
subtitle start/stop or the MPV playback position.
Screencast with audio of using the waveforms
I'm experimenting with adding repeating
keybindings. There was a
subed-mpv-frame-step-map that was bound to C-c
C-f, so I've renamed it to subed-mpv-control,
added a whole bunch of keybindings to the
subed-mpv-control-map based on MPV and Aegisub
shortcuts, and made it a repeating transient map.
Screencast with audio, experimenting with the mpv control map
Ideas for next steps:
Gotta get the hang of all these new capabilities
through practice! =)
To make my subed-align-region workflow even more
convenient, I could use completing-read to let
me select a future subtitle with completion, and
then Emacs could automatically fix the subtitle
start time, go to the previous subtitle, and
realign the region.
Also, I think switching the waveforms from overlays to
text properties could be a good idea. When I cut
text, the overlays get left behind, but I want the
waveforms to go away too.
While writing this post and fiddling with subed, I
ended up adding a bunch of keybindings and a menu.
I figured this was as good a time as any to stop
tweaking it and finally publish. (But it's fun!
Just one more idea…)
