clovervidia / youtube-xml2ass

Convert YouTube annotations to .ass/.ssa subtitle format

This is a fork of https://github.com/joeky888/youtube-xmL2ass with better color handling, which itself is a fork of https://github.com/nirbheek/youtube-ass with bug fixed

You can either convert a local XML file from youtube-dl to an .ass sub file, or download the XML from YouTube and convert that to an .ass sub file.

You'll need to install requests if you want to download the XML file from YouTube.

Download the video's annotations as XML with youtube-dl

youtube-dl --write-annotations <VIDEO_URL>

Download the video's annotations from YouTube and convert them

./youtube-xml2ass.py <VIDEO_ID>

The subs file will be named <VIDEO_ID>.ass.

Convert the XML to ass subtitle

./youtube-xml2ass.py YOUR_XML_FILE.xml

The subs file will be named the same as your annotations file, but will remove .annotations.xml from the end and replace it with .ass.

Bugs fixed

• Python2/3 supported
• UTF-8 characters supported
• Using '16777215' as white color instead of '1'
• Escape '\n' in the XML text area
• Format floating number to two decimal points
• Convert background colors from decimal RGB to BGR
• Use the opaque box BorderStyle to more closely mimic how annotations looked on YouTube (transparency would be nice as well, working on this)
• Can now download annotations XML from YouTube directly or process a local XML