This feature requires an Advanced, Premium or Enterprise account with the Events feature added.
Vimeo Advanced, Premium, and Enterprise members can enable automated closed captions for their virtual events during the setup process, allowing your content to be more accessible to your audience.
In this article:
- Configure Auto CC for live events
- Total stream time remaining
- Enhanced speech detection
- Additional notes
Configure Auto CC for live events
Upon creating a new event, you can enable Automatic closed captions by using the toggle under Optional features.
After creating a live event, you can edit your Automatic closed captions settings by navigating to Settings > Production on the lefthand panel.
Closed captions will be disabled by default. Click the toggle switch to enable automatic captions for your stream.
Total stream time remaining
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.
Premium and Advanced users include 2 hours of automatic captioning per year.
Enterprise users are granted 30 hours of captioning time. Any Enterprise user 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.
Example: This happened with our Premium and Advanced users streaming an event with 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.
If you would like to add more hours of automatic captioning to your Premium or Advanced membership, contact our team to learn about our Enterprise offerings.
Enhanced speech detection
Below the language dropdown menu 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 whether your content is from live cameras or a pre-recorded video. Viewers can see the captions by clicking the [CC] button at 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.
- Automatically generated captions are labeled as "English (Autogenerated)” to clarify to viewers and distinguish between manually uploaded captions.
- 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.
- Streaming a live event via HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) will display automatically generated closed captions on third-party HLS-compatible players.