I’m not a big fan of the big snowball fad that “AI” is nowadays, mostly because it’s 1% technology and 99% marketing. Or actually 1% technology, 1% marketing and 98% bullshit. I don’t need to prove this, it has been done several times. Also it’s not artificial intelligence, it’s just advanced applied statistics. If you don’t understand the difference, read more about what an LLM really is.

However, for today I plan to create some subtitles using the power of an LLM, and the main target is a TV show I remember watching as a kid, although I don’t remember anything from it, Fish Police.

Why? Well, because first of all, I got used to have subtitles turned on, in case I miss any important cues in the dialogue, or things that I might misunderstand.

I did search all over on the internet, including RuTracker, and you know something’s messed up when the Russian pirates don’t have a release for download. I was able to find a source on a different tracker, which was ripped from Romanian TV channel PRO Cinema. That’s cool. But it didn’t have any subtitles. After a while, I’ve found out some on OpenSubtitles, but only for the first episode. And it’s then when I decided I need to take the lazy approach to the situation and generate some subtitles using an LLM.

After spending some research, I discovered Buzz by Chidi Williams, which is nice because it comes with a ready to use .app file for MacOS.

I opened Buzz, and observed that it can scan only MP4, WEBM and OGM video files, and my episodes were in AVI format, so instead of reconverting them to something else, I transformed them to MP3, using To MP3 (which I already mentioned in the bootleg article), as Buzz can process MP3, WAV, M4A, and OGG. After the app will finish making the transcript, I’ll just delete the mp3 files.

The biggest difference in processing is the “Quality” setting, where the “High” setting took about one hour to process a 20-minute audio file on my Apple M2 Max processor, while the “Very Low” took about 5 minutes.

While the High Quality subtitles seem to be 99.5% spot on, the Very Low Quality ones do seem to miss a few words, especially when it’s overlapping with louder music or sound effects. To be honest, probably the Medium quality would bring a good balance of processing speed and accuracy, but I’m not in a hurry so they can take their time.

Running Buzz with 4 concurrent threads processing at High Quality made the fans on my MacBook Pro spin for the first time since I bought it and while not playing a game.

Either way, I have added an archive containing all the subtitles below for your use and judgement, containing the following files:

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Fish Police - 1x01 - The Shell Game (bobo) (i2) [s-mouche].srt
Fish Police - 1x02 - A Fish Out of Water (bobo) [andruska].srt
Fish Police - 1x03 - Beauty's Only Fin Deep (bobo) [s-mouche].srt
Fish Police - 1x04 - The Codfather (bobo) [s-mouche].srt
Fish Police - 1x05 - The Two Gils (bobo) [s-mouche].srt
Fish Police - 1x06 - No Way to Treat a Fillet-dy (bobo) [andruska].srt

Downloads