jun7799/scribe-transcribe

This is a Chinese-language command-line tool that does two things together: it downloads videos from WeChat Channels, the Tencent short-video service, and then transcribes the audio into subtitles and plain text. The README is in Chinese and the workflow assumes a user who already opens WeChat Channels in a desktop browser. The tool is a Python wrapper around a Go program. The Go binary, called wx-dl, runs a local proxy and an HTTP API. When the user opens the WeChat Channels web page through this proxy, the page receives an injected download button that the original site does not show. The Python side, main.py, manages the proxy process, calls ffmpeg to pull a 16 kHz mono WAV out of the downloaded file, runs the audio through faster-whisper for local speech-to-text, and exports SRT subtitles plus a plain text version. To install, the user needs Go 1.21 or newer, Python 3.10 or newer, ffmpeg, and git. They clone the repository, build the Go downloader into a bin folder, then run pip install -r requirements.txt. A Tsinghua mirror URL is offered for users in mainland China. The first transcription downloads a faster-whisper model of roughly 462 MB and caches it for later runs. Day-to-day usage is start.bat on Windows or start.sh on Mac and Linux. After the script launches, the user opens channels.weixin.qq.com in a normal desktop browser, and the injected button lets them save the current video. There is no need to configure a proxy on the phone for this path; the proxy lives on the same machine that runs the browser. The README also describes a CLI mode with python main.py serve, python main.py transcribe some-video.mp4, and python main.py tasks. An optional section explains how to point a phone at the desktop's proxy through Wi-Fi for in-app downloads. The FAQ covers a missing download button, mobile proxy connectivity, slow CPU transcription that can switch to CUDA by editing WHISPER_DEVICE in config.py, and Windows or sudo permissions. The license is GPL-3.0-or-later, matching the upstream scribe-studio project. Credits list scribe-studio and wx_channels_download.