Critical Role

Linkable transcripts: the “API”

Given that we have a database of all the lines spoken in all the episodes of Critical Role campaigns 1, 2, and 3 (and ExU), there are a few other small useful things that can be done here.

You can already browse all the Critical Role transcripts or search them, but it's useful to, for example, link to a particular time, or link to a particular video, without having to look up the details.

That's what this page is for: it describes the “API” that's available to other sites to link into the transcripts and episodes here.

Linking to a transcript line by time

If you want to link to a particular part of a transcript by time, use bytime.php by constructing a link like the below. Let's say you want to link to the time 1h13m22s in episode 25 of campaign 2, Divergent Paths. Construct this link:

https://kryogenix.org/crsearch/bytime.php?c=2&e=25&h=1&m=13&s=22

This link will redirect to the line in the transcript of that episode which happens at the time you specify. It does not have to be the exact time a line starts; if you provide a time which doesn't match up exactly with a line, then the latest line that happens before that time is the one redirected to. You can try the above link here, and you'll see that it links to a line spoken by Marisha, at 1h 13m and 21 seconds.

Linking to a YouTube video by campaign and episode number

It is occasionally useful to be able to link directly to a video of CR when what you know is its episode number: Campaign 2, Episode 71, for example. It's possible to look this up by hand, but if you want to automate this process (if you are, for example, CritRoleStats or something) then it's good to not have to. So, if what you know is that this is episode 2-71 Family Gathering, then you can construct a link which will redirect straight to the YouTube video of this episode like this:

https://kryogenix.org/crsearch/redir.php?q=2-71 Family Gathering&time=1h2m3s

Specify the episode number and name with q= in the URL. The formatting for this is a little picky: you need to specify three parts, here, C-E TITLE. That is: the q= value you provide must be 1-18 Some Title Here or similar. The redirector doesn't actually check the title, so you could if you really need to construct a link with q=2-19 Some Made Up Lies, but the campaign and episode numbers must be present and connected with a hyphen. Episode numbers do not need to be zero-prefixed: use 2-9, not 2-09.

You must also specify time=1h1m1s (with the time point you want), which is passed on to YouTube. All of h, m and s must be specified. If you don't care about the time and just want to link to the episode as a whole, provide time=0h0m0s.

Downloading all the transcripts

Various people asked if they can have access to the transcripts so they can do all sorts of terrifying natural language and ML analysis on them. There is, therefore, a zip file of all the transcripts as machine-readable HTML available. The README file inside the zip explains in more detail.

Warning: please do not, do not repeatedly download this file and overwhelm the bandwidth of this site, or I'll have to stop providing it. See the README for details on how to update your local copy with newer files as more episodes are released.

Looking up quotations

The wiki has lots of quotations from the episode, and it would be useful if they were all annotated with exactly where they were said. So here's a small tool which might help with that. Drag this link → [Add quote buttons] ← to your bookmarks bar, or right-click it and say "Bookmark this link". Then, while you're looking at a page about an episode on the CR Wiki, click the button in your bookmarks bar, or open the bookmark it made. This should add a "search" button to the end of each quotation in the Quotations section of the episode page. Clicking one of these search buttons will attempt to look up that quotation in the transcripts for this episode and present you with a link to it in the episode VOD on YouTube, which will hopefully help to annotate episode quotations with links. Note that this does not actually edit the wiki! You will still need to copy the text into the edit screen; this simply speeds up the process of searching for the quotation text. Note also that it can't be perfectly reliable; some quotations will work and some won't.

(Here's a little video showing how this works: watch on youtube.)