HTML transcripts don’t work
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HTML transcripts don’t display correctly.
Example: https://pca.st/episode/a25ee872-adbc-4c90-a2d4-25382d856641
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Hi there, @kapods22! Thanks for sharing a link to one of the episodes.
Could you give me an example of a portion of the episode transcript that is not showing up correctly? You can also share a screenshot. Once we have more details we can investigate further. Thank you!
Update: Our team has identified the error in the transcript. This should be fixed in a future update. -
Thank you. Do still need a screenshot? I attached one just in case.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YmOPrqhSK8X0f5-Z9QhjDNFq88TCmOGf/view?usp=drivesdk
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Update: The line breaks are fixed, but most speaker names are missing and it is still plain text (no bold, italics, or links). Here is a screenshot comparing how it looks in Pocket Casts to the HTML file in the
<podcast:transcript>tag.https://drive.google.com/file/d/1b8AqJvfgPnofTQJbGcVGnIJjPkzd5A7_/view?usp=drivesdk
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Hi there, @kapods22! I checked on this and found that our team recommends adhering to the Podcasting 2 guidelines for HTML transcripts. They also made some improves to how our system parses this type of transcript. You should see improvements compared to last year.
If you do have issues with a specific episode let us know so we can take a look. -
Hi @staff-eleanor,
One example is this episode of my podcast: https://pca.st/7oax0ez6
While it doesn’t use the Podcasting 2.0 specs (I didn’t start making transcripts with timestamps until March 20, 2025; transcript generators aren’t very accurate with my podcast in particular, so it would be a lot of work to generate and edit transcripts for my back catalog), it looks perfectly fine on the website/desktop app:

But on the mobile app (at least iOS), however, most of the speaker names (e.g., “DEVON:”) are missing and the formatting (i.e., bold, italics, and links) has been removed:

iPhone App (version 8.6.0.5) Best,
Devon
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Hi there, Devon! Thanks for the update and the example episode. I’ve reported this to the team so they can take a look. Once we have more information we’ll reply here with an update.