Panopto video link with captions on

Posted on by Tom Woodward

We had a request to be able to make Panopto videos show the captions automatically. I thought that should be possible.

The first thing I did was try to Google an answer. I ended up on the Panopto embed API page. It has enableCaptions as an option so I tried that in the URL in a few different ways and it did not work. Stuff like . . .

  1. https://midd.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=966155a4-cf51-4e90-b042-b12400e21e9a&enableCaptions=1
  2. https://midd.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=966155a4-cf51-4e90-b042-b12400e21e9a&enableCaptions=”1″
  3. https://midd.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=966155a4-cf51-4e90-b042-b12400e21e9a&enableCaptions=true

I threw my question (Is there a method to enable captions in Panopto videos using URL parameters?)1 in ChatGPT for the hell of it.2 The response was . . .

As of now, Panopto does not officially support enabling captions through URL parameters. Captions are typically controlled by the video player settings, which must be manually enabled by the user while watching a video. Users can turn on captions by clicking the “CC” (Closed Captions) button within the Panopto player if captions are available for the video.

GPT says it, so it must be true mathematically constructed language that has no necessary association to the truth and so I wasn’t quite satisfied.

The next step was to look at the Panopto’s embed code generator. Turns out it has an option to automatically show captions via a checkbox. I checked the box and generated the embed code.

Then I looked at the URL (below) it gave for the iframe and, because I look at URLs as the great Alan Levine has long preached, I could make some sense of it. 

https://midd.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Embed.aspx?id=966155a4-cf51-4e90-b042-b12400e21e9a&autoplay=false&offerviewer=true&showtitle=true&showbrand=true&captions=true&interactivity=all

That works by itself as a link and shows captions. Great. It is really long though and I wondered how much was really necessary. I just removed everything except &captions=true and it still worked. Now I have an easy answer with the least amount of extra work.

So the link progression is something like this.

  1. regular link – https://midd.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=966155a4-cf51-4e90-b042-b12400e21e9a
  2. embed link with captions on – https://midd.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Embed.aspx?id=966155a4-cf51-4e90-b042-b12400e21e9a&autoplay=false&offerviewer=true&showtitle=true&showbrand=true&captions=true&interactivity=all
  3. simplest link with captions on – https://midd.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Embed.aspx?id=966155a4-cf51-4e90-b042-b12400e21e9a&captions=true

1 URL parameters is one of those secret vocabulary terms that often gets me the results I want. Words matter in search. Words will continue to matter even in an AI apocalypse.

2 I firmly believe that if Google or other search engines worked better AI would be far less interesting to people.

2 thoughts on “Panopto video link with captions on”

  1. Nifty! Long live (we can just hope or maybe just delude ourselves) the editable parameters in a URL.

    The janky thing is (wow, that is second time in ah hour I pulled out that adjective) is how you make something work for this in panopto, kaltura, et al and in a matter of months, they change it up on you.

    Reply

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