Whisper is genuinely amazing - with the right nudging. It's the one AI thing that has genuinely turned my life upside-down in an unambiguously good way.
People should check out Subtitle Edit (and throw the dev some money) which is a great interface for experimenting with Whisper transcription. It's basically Aegisub 2.0, if you're old, like me.
HOWTO:
Drop a video or audio file to the right window, then go to Video > Audio to text (Whisper). I get the best results with Faster-Whisper-XXL. Use large-v2 if you can (v3 has some regressions), and you've got an easy transcription and translation workflow. The results aren't perfect, but Subtitle Edit is for cleaning up imperfect transcripts with features like Tools > Fix common errors.
EDIT: Oh, and if you're on the current gen of Nvidia card, you might have to add "--compute_type float32" to make the transcription run correctly. I think the error is about an empty file, output or something like that.
EDIT2: And if you get another error, possibly about whisper.exe, iirc I had to reinstall the Torch libs from a specific index like something along these lines (depending on whether you use pip or uv):
pip3 install torch torchvision torchaudio --index-url https://download.pytorch.org/whl/cu118
uv pip install --system torch torchvision torchaudio --index-url https://download.pytorch.org/whl/cu118
If you get the errors and the above fixes work, please type your error message in a reply with what worked to help those who come after. Or at least the web crawlers for those searching for help.
https://www.nikse.dk/subtitleedit
https://www.nikse.dk/donate
https://github.com/SubtitleEdit/subtitleedit/releases
People should check out Subtitle Edit (and throw the dev some money) which is a great interface for experimenting with Whisper transcription. It's basically Aegisub 2.0, if you're old, like me.
HOWTO:
Drop a video or audio file to the right window, then go to Video > Audio to text (Whisper). I get the best results with Faster-Whisper-XXL. Use large-v2 if you can (v3 has some regressions), and you've got an easy transcription and translation workflow. The results aren't perfect, but Subtitle Edit is for cleaning up imperfect transcripts with features like Tools > Fix common errors.
EDIT: Oh, and if you're on the current gen of Nvidia card, you might have to add "--compute_type float32" to make the transcription run correctly. I think the error is about an empty file, output or something like that.
EDIT2: And if you get another error, possibly about whisper.exe, iirc I had to reinstall the Torch libs from a specific index like something along these lines (depending on whether you use pip or uv):
If you get the errors and the above fixes work, please type your error message in a reply with what worked to help those who come after. Or at least the web crawlers for those searching for help.https://www.nikse.dk/subtitleedit
https://www.nikse.dk/donate
https://github.com/SubtitleEdit/subtitleedit/releases