PodScribe

A modern podcast transcript forum for browsing, searching, and contributing podcast transcripts across multiple languages.

Screenshots

Homepage

Episode View

Search

Features

• Multi-language transcripts — View and switch between transcript languages; default display in the podcast's original language
• Full-text search — Trigram-based search across podcast names, episodes, transcript content, and guest names
• Reading mode — Distraction-free transcript reading with floating toggle
• Embedded media player — Play episodes with synchronized transcript highlighting
• Revision history — Git-like versioning for community-contributed transcript edits
• Anonymous upload — Submit transcripts via web UI or Chrome extension
• Speaker tags — Normalized speaker labels with visual differentiation
• Light / dark theme — Toggleable with system-preference-aware defaults
• Responsive design — Optimized for desktop and mobile
• Category & host browsing — Sidebar navigation by podcast category

Tech Stack

Quick Start

# Install dependencies
npm install
cd client && npm install && cd ..

# Seed the database (optional)
npm run seed

# Development (two terminals)
npm run dev:server   # Express API on :4010
npm run dev:client   # Vite dev server on :5173

# Production build
npm run build
npm start            # Serves both API and built frontend on :4010

Project Structure

├── client/                 # React frontend
│   ├── src/
│   │   ├── components/     # Header, Sidebar, MediaPlayer, TranscriptEditor, ...
│   │   ├── pages/          # Home, Episode, Podcast, Search, Upload
│   │   └── styles/         # Global CSS, theme variables
│   └── vite.config.js
├── server/                 # Express backend
│   └── src/
│       ├── routes/         # podcasts, episodes, search, upload, revisions
│       ├── db.js           # SQLite setup + FTS5 trigram migration
│       └── index.js        # Express app
├── scripts/                # Utility scripts (seed, crawl, ASR, translation)
├── tests/                  # API test suite
└── data/                   # SQLite database (gitignored)

API

All endpoints are under /api.

Testing

npm test

Runs the full API test suite (~50 test cases) covering CRUD operations, search, multi-language transcripts, revisions, uploads, and cascade deletes.

Scripts

Codex Skills

This repo now includes repo-local Codex skills under .codex/skills for the two workflows that are most repetitive here:

• podcast-transcript-pipeline for episode updates, ASR, repolish, postprocess, inline-speaker cleanup, and transcript QA.
• podcast-forum-deploy for main-repo builds, newserver deployment, restart, and verification.
• podcast-quality-repair for podcast-level audit and fast repair planning when speaker labels, transcript language, translation rows, or paragraph splits drift over time.

Transcript policy: for YouTube episodes, start from ASR as the default source of truth. Legacy youtube_auto and youtube_manual rows can exist in old data, but new repair and ingestion flows should replace them instead of building on them.

License

ISC