How are you all handling Sinhala captions/subtitles for video?

askpi

Member
Sep 30, 2007
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Curious what people are actually using for this. I've been looking into auto-caption tools for Sinhala content and most of the well-known ones (YouTube auto-captions, CapCut, etc.) either don't support it at all or produce pretty rough output — misplaced characters, wrong conjuncts, that kind of thing, which makes sense since it's a complex script most of these tools weren't really built around.

I've been using captionlk.com, which is built specifically for Sinhala/Tamil rather than being one of forty languages bolted onto a general engine, and it's worked reasonably well for me so far — but I'm curious what else is out there and what other people's experience has been.

A few things I'm curious about:

  • Is anyone doing Sinhala (or Tamil) captions reliably right now, and with what?
  • Manual captioning vs. some auto-transcribe + manual cleanup workflow — which are people actually doing day to day?
  • Is burned-in vs. soft-sub the norm for where you're posting (Reels/TikTok/YouTube), or does it depend?
  • Anyone tried the newer transcription APIs (Whisper, GPT-based ones) directly for this and had better or worse luck than the mainstream caption apps?
Mostly trying to understand where the real pain points are — script rendering, transcription accuracy, timing, workflow, whatever's actually annoying rather than what I'd assume from the outside.