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[Bug] Captions for videos with chapters have a blank line after each cue #5395

@fieryhenry

Description

@fieryhenry

Describe the bug

For videos which have chapters (ie they have timestamps in the description) the captions displayed will have a blank line after each cue:

Captions with blank line after a queue

Notice the third line is empty.

I am using innertube for captions, not sure if this issue is exclusive to innertube.

This happens because in the caption file invidious serves to the user (e.g /api/v1/captions/b1Fo_M_tj6w?Label=English), the file has overlapping cue timestamps where the chapters are, but contain no content, for example:

WEBVTT

0:00:00.000 --> 0:00:23.000


0:00:03.384 --> 0:00:06.874
In this video we'll show you
how to add chapters within your videos

0:00:06.922 --> 0:00:10.004
which helps viewers 
better navigate and enjoy your videos.

0:00:10.760 --> 0:00:12.774
While scrubbing through a video
on your device

0:00:12.774 --> 0:00:15.510
chapter titles appear
as segments in the scrubber bar

0:00:15.510 --> 0:00:17.778
and as a title below the thumbnail preview.

0:00:18.063 --> 0:00:21.307
This feature is automatically enabled
when you add chapter information

0:00:21.307 --> 0:00:22.858
to your video's description.

0:00:23.000 --> 0:01:07.000


0:00:24.126 --> 0:00:28.855
To get started, open your video's description
to add a list of timestamps and titles.

(see the 0:00:00.000 --> 0:00:23.000 and 0:00:23.000 --> 0:01:07.000)

It seems to depend on what language the captions are and what language the video (or maybe just description) is. For example when using the english captions for english videos this issue doesn't occur because for other languages the webvtt file does not contain these overlapping cue timestamps.

However if you enable the japanese captions for a japanese video with chapters you still get this issue (e.g https://youtube.com/watch?v=l01_q8c6UM8):

Image

Steps to Reproduce
Steps to reproduce the behavior:

  1. Go to this video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=b1Fo_M_tj6w
  2. Enable english captions
  3. See the blank line after each cue

Also I am using invidious companion with innertube for captions which might be relevant.

I'm not sure if this is an invidious issue or an innertube issue or a videojs issue, but I did try to use this innertube python package here to download the transcript to see if it contained the weird overlapping timestamps, but it did not.

I tried this on a few public instances but most of them didn't have english captions working. The only instance where english captions were working was inv.nadeko.net but that didn't have the issue (the /api/v1/captions/...` didn't have the overlapping timestamps)

This issue isn't that serious but it is a bit annoying especially if no captions are present for a section because then you just get a vertical bar on its own:

Image

Additional context

Invidious with invidious companion running the docker image, but this also occurred when building both from source.

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