mathiasandClaude Opus 4.8
92da25d01e
Vimeo texttracks API is owner-only (worse than YouTube, no public timedtext) → defer. Whisper viable as a no-caption fallback; berget/whisper-large-v3 already on the gateway (cloud), local options on iguana/koala carry setup+GPU-contention cost (ADR-007). Both investigated inline (session sub-agents are network-sandboxed). Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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3.3 KiB
Vimeo — captions/transcripts feasibility for tapir (research, 2026-06-02)
Researched by the Conductor (sub-agents were network-sandboxed). Mapped to tapir's
VideoSource port (ListSubscriptions, NewVideos, FetchTranscript).
Verdict: SAME owner-only wall as YouTube, and WORSE fallback options.
Q3 (the gating question) — text tracks for videos you DON'T own
- Official API is owner-only. Vimeo Help Center: "You must use a personal token
generated as the account owner of the video in order to access your video's transcripts
via API." So
GET /videos/{id}/texttracksreturns tracks only for videos the authenticated account owns — identical to YouTubecaptions.download. Source: https://help.vimeo.com/hc/en-us/articles/17480150130833 - The text-track
linkpoints tocaptions.cloud.vimeo.com/....vtt?token=...— a token-gated URL, not a clean public file. Source: https://developer.vimeo.com/api/reference/response/text-track - The API is also widely reported flaky (vimeo/openapi#16 "Texttracks API doesn't work as advertised"). Source: https://github.com/vimeo/openapi/issues/16
Unofficial fallback — weaker than YouTube's timedtext
- Captions are loadable via the embed player, yielding
[n].vtt?token=...requests, and yt-dlp can pull Vimeo subs with cookies. But every documented method needs a registered/logged-in viewer ("you need to be registered in Vimeo to retrieve subtitles"). There is no clean unauthenticated public timedtext equivalent like YouTube'scaptionTracks[].baseUrl. Sources: https://gist.github.com/pjmartorell/384aa1d019f919af6b84894038bf29aa , https://github.com/vimeo/openapi/blob/master/api.yaml - Needs live verification: whether
player.vimeo.com/video/{id}/configreturns atext_tracks[]with usable token'd URLs for arbitrary PUBLIC videos without owner auth. Likely partially works for public/embeddable videos but is undocumented and brittle.
Subscriptions / new videos (the easy part)
- "Following" exists:
/me/following(users), plus channels/groups feeds; per-user video lists via/users/{id}/videossortable by date. Maps toListSubscriptions/NewVideos. Source: https://developer.vimeo.com/api/reference - Auth: OAuth2; many endpoints/scopes and higher rate limits require app review, and some metadata is gated behind paid plans. (Tier/plan gating: needs-verification.)
Feasibility for tapir
- A Vimeo adapter could do subscriptions + new-video detection fine.
- Transcripts are the blocker, same as YouTube but harder: official path owner-only, unofficial path requires a logged-in viewer (cookie/token), no public timedtext.
- Realistic Stage-0 stance: defer Vimeo. YouTube via the timedtext path (ADR-010) covers the maintainer's actual subscriptions; Vimeo adds a second brittle, auth-gated caption path for a smaller share of content. If pursued: the cookie'd player-config method or yt-dlp-with-cookies, behind the same "ToS-grey, opt-in" framing — a future ADR.
- This is consistent with the port design: Vimeo is just another adapter; nothing in the engine changes when/if it's added.
Biggest risk: there is no public, unauthenticated caption path on Vimeo — any third-party transcript fetch needs a logged-in session/cookie, which is more fragile and more ToS-exposed than YouTube timedtext.