HTML transcripts don’t work

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  kapods22 · Member · March 17, 2025 at 9:32 pm

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  HTML transcripts don’t display correctly.

  Example: https://pca.st/episode/a25ee872-adbc-4c90-a2d4-25382d856641

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  staff-eleanor · Staff · March 18, 2025 at 12:17 pm

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  Hi there, @kapods22! Thanks for sharing a link to one of the episodes.
  Could you give me an example of a portion of the episode transcript that is not showing up correctly? You can also share a screenshot. Once we have more details we can investigate further. Thank you!
  Update: Our team has identified the error in the transcript. This should be fixed in a future update.

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  kapods22 · Member · March 18, 2025 at 8:12 pm

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  Thank you. Do still need a screenshot? I attached one just in case.

  https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YmOPrqhSK8X0f5-Z9QhjDNFq88TCmOGf/view?usp=drivesdk

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  staff-eleanor · Staff · March 19, 2025 at 1:38 pm

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  Thanks for the screenshot! That is how the transcript appears for me on mobile also.

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  kapods22 · Member · March 29, 2025 at 2:37 pm

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  Update: The line breaks are fixed, but most speaker names are missing and it is still plain text (no bold, italics, or links). Here is a screenshot comparing how it looks in Pocket Casts to the HTML file in the <podcast:transcript> tag.

  https://drive.google.com/file/d/1b8AqJvfgPnofTQJbGcVGnIJjPkzd5A7_/view?usp=drivesdk

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  staff-cara · Staff · April 1, 2025 at 1:33 am

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  Thanks for the update, @kapods22! I’ve asked our developers to look into this again.

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  kapods22 · Member · March 7, 2026 at 11:33 pm

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  Hello. Is there any update on this?

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  staff-eleanor · Staff · March 10, 2026 at 5:26 pm

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  Hi there, @kapods22! I checked on this and found that our team recommends adhering to the Podcasting 2 guidelines for HTML transcripts. They also made some improves to how our system parses this type of transcript. You should see improvements compared to last year.
  If you do have issues with a specific episode let us know so we can take a look.

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  kapods22 · Member · March 10, 2026 at 7:03 pm

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  Hi @staff-eleanor,

  One example is this episode of my podcast: https://pca.st/7oax0ez6

  While it doesn’t use the Podcasting 2.0 specs (I didn’t start making transcripts with timestamps until March 20, 2025; transcript generators aren’t very accurate with my podcast in particular, so it would be a lot of work to generate and edit transcripts for my back catalog), it looks perfectly fine on the website/desktop app:

  

  But on the mobile app (at least iOS), however, most of the speaker names (e.g., “DEVON:”) are missing and the formatting (i.e., bold, italics, and links) has been removed:

  

  Best,

  Devon

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  staff-eleanor · Staff · March 14, 2026 at 5:21 pm

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  Hi there, Devon! Thanks for the update and the example episode. I’ve reported this to the team so they can take a look. Once we have more information we’ll reply here with an update.

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  staff-joey8 · Staff · March 27, 2026 at 5:41 am

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  Hi again!

  Our developers have mentioned:

  The iOS app will give preference to the VTT format. If that format has the speaker information, it will use it.

  It looks that the creator is now providing VTTs for transcripts, this should address the issue

  Regarding the HTML transcripts, we are filtering out the HTML elements so we can show the transcript in a standard format, which is why any formatting elements are removed.

  Please feel free to create a new thread if anything else comes up!