Video Swear Jar - The AI-Powered Profanity Filter

Introducing Video Swear Jar, your AI-powered solution for creating clean video content! This project offers a Docker container with all necessary tools to process videos, transcribe the audio, detect profanity, and remove inappropriate language, delivering a new, family-friendly video file.

Project Goals

• Simplify the process of removing profanity from video files. The current process is quite technical, and we aim to make it more user-friendly.
• Enable local processing without relying on an internet connection.
• Minimize cost for users by keeping the solution as affordable as possible.

Process Overview

• Transcribe the video file using OpenAI Whisper
• Process the transcription file:
  • Detects profanity based on predefined swear-words.json file
  • Generate an FFmpeg video cut file.
• Use FFmpeg to cut the video file at specified times and create a new, edited video file.

Requirements

• Docker installed

Usage

# create new video file with profanity removed
docker run --rm -it \
  -v $(pwd):/data jveldboom/video-swear-jar:v1 \
  clean --input video.mkv --model tiny.en --language en

# recommended to mount a ".whisper" directory to locally cache large language models
docker run --rm -it \
  -v $(pwd):/data \
  -v $(pwd)/.whisper:/app/.whisper jveldboom/video-swear-jar:v1 \
  clean --input video.mkv --model tiny.en --language en

Arguments

• --input - path to video file
• --model - whisper model name - tiny, tiny.en (default), base, base.en, small, small.en, medium, medium.sm, large. View official docs for break down of model size and performance
• --language - language code. Typically improves in transcription to set language instead of allowing Whisper to auto-detect.
• --engine - transcription engine whisper-ctranslate2 (default) or whisper. whisper is likely to be removed in the near future if/when whisper-ctranslate2 proves to be just as good but 4x faster

Known Issues

• Error: Command "whisper" exited with code null - this is likely caused by the container needing more allocated memory. Allocating at least 4 GB memory for the small.en usually resolved the issue but your mileage may vary.

Utility Commands

There are a handful of utility commands that I find useful in the workflow to edit a video that are available in the Docker container.

cut-video

Allows you to manually create a list of timestamps to cut the video.

Usage:

docker run --rm -it -v $(pwd):/data jveldboom/video-swear-jar:v1 \
  cut-video --timestamp timestamps.txt --video video.mkv

• --timestamp - path to file with timestamps. Each timestamp must be on a new line in HH:MM:SS - HH:MM:SS format
• --video - path to video to cut the video
• --cut-video - optional boolean to set to not cut video but only output cut file

read-subtitles

Reads a subtitle file and prints out the lines with swear words. Useful if you want to cut the video manually.

Usage:

docker run --rm -it -v $(pwd):/data jveldboom/video-swear-jar:v1 \
  read-subtitles --subtitles path/to/subtitle.srt

• --subtitles - path to file with timestamps

whisper

This is the whisper CLI if you need to further customize the command. Visit https://github.com/openai/whisper for full details

Usage:

docker run --rm -it -v $(pwd):/data jveldboom/video-swear-jar:v1 \
  whisper my-video.mp4 \
    --model tiny.en \
    --language en \
    --output_format json \
    --output_dir data

ffmpeg

Usage:

docker run --rm -it -v $(pwd):/data jveldboom/video-swear-jar:v1 \
  ffmpeg -i input.mp4 output.avi

Roadmap

• Add Node to container to run everything within the container
• Finalize initial documentation with required steps to run
• Include scripts into container to not use root Makefile as the local interface
• Run all processes within a Node or shell script to eliminate the need for passing variables in the Makefile
• Improve logging to let users know what steps are being ran
• Create CI jobs to run on PRs
• Create build jobs to version and publish container image
• Allow user to define output directory
• Create logging abstraction for info, warning, error, debug, etc
• Add debug flag to commands
• Add unit tests
• Clean up files after process is complete
• Allow users to pass in a custom swear-words.json file (replace or add)
• Reduce linux/amd64 container image size -- ideally less than 1GB

Notes

Alternatives

Below is a small list of possible alternatives to vide-swear-jar.

• AWS Transcribe - in my testing this provides very good results but is relatively expensive for small projects plus it requires uploading your video files to the cloud.
• OpenAI Whisper API - requires uploading video to cloud

Tools

Small list of tool I use in my workflow

• MakeMKV - "convert videos (DVD/Blu-ray) that you own into free and patents-unencumbered format that can be played everywhere"