Peertube Plugin Sidebar Transcript

A PeerTube plugin that adds a sliding transcript sidebar to the video player, allowing viewers to read and navigate captions in real time. Works on both the watch page and in OEmbed/iframe embeds.

Requirements

• PeerTube >= 6.0.0
• Videos must have at least one caption/subtitle file (WebVTT) uploaded

Installation

Via PeerTube Admin UI

1. Navigate to Administration → Plugins/Themes
2. Search for peertube-plugin-sidebar-transcript
3. Click Install

Configuration

No global configuration is required. The plugin is self-contained and activates automatically on any video that has captions available.

Usage

The transcript sidebar is activated via the ?transcript=1 query parameter on the video or embed URL. When active:

1. A ≡ (transcript) button appears in the player control bar.
2. Clicking the button slides open a sidebar panel on the right side of the player.
3. The sidebar displays all caption segments with timestamps. The currently playing segment is highlighted and auto-scrolled into view.
4. Clicking any segment seeks the video to that timecode and begins playback.
5. Clicking outside the sidebar or when the player becomes inactive, the sidebar closes automatically.

Sharing with transcript enabled

When a video has captions, a "Include transcript" checkbox is injected into the PeerTube share/embed modal. Checking it appends ?transcript=1 to the share URL so recipients see the transcript sidebar automatically.

Behaviour notes

• Caption selection — the plugin uses the first available caption track returned by the PeerTube captions API (/api/v1/videos/{uuid}/captions).
• VTT parsing — the client-side parser handles standard WebVTT timing lines (HH:MM:SS.mmm --> HH:MM:SS.mmm), normalising comma decimal separators and optional hour components.
• Keyboard accessible — transcript segments are focusable and respond to Enter/Space for seeking.
• Responsive — on viewports narrower than 300 px the sidebar expands to full width instead of a fixed 300 px panel.
• Scopes — the client script is registered for both embed and common scopes, so the sidebar works on the main watch page as well as standalone embeds.
• No-op when inactive — if ?transcript=1 is not present in the URL, no sidebar components are injected and no caption data is fetched, keeping overhead at zero for normal playback.

Limitations

• Only the first caption track is displayed; there is no language selector within the sidebar.
• Does not currently support live/streaming captions — only pre-uploaded VTT files.
• The sidebar overlays the right edge of the video; on very narrow players the video area may become small.

Maintainers

• University Library System, University of Pittsburgh

License

GNU AGPLv3