I wanted a way to transcribe audio and video files without sending anything to the cloud. No OpenAI API key, no monthly bill, no data leaving my machine. So I built player2text — a local transcription API powered by faster-whisper. Here's what it does and how I built it. Most transcription tools either cost money per minute, require an API key, or both. For personal projects, meeting recordings, or anything sensitive, that's not ideal. Whisper runs locally and it's surprisingly good — the challenge is just wrapping it in something usable. FastAPI — clean async API, great auto-generated docs at /docs faster-whisper — 4x faster than original Whisper, ~50% less RAM, same accuracy ffmpeg — handles all the audio/video heavy lifting The best part of this project is the pre-processing step. Before transcription, every file gets passed through ffmpeg: ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vn -acodec pcm_s16le -ar 16000 -ac 1 output.wav This strips the video stream, downsamples to 16kHz mono (Whisper's native rate), and converts to raw PCM. A 300MB video becomes about 5MB. Transcription is dramatically faster as a result. One endpoint does everything: POST /api/v1/transcribe Send a file (and optionally a language code), get back: { "text": "Full transcript here...", "language": "en", "duration": 462.74, "segments": [ { "id": 1, "start": 0.0, "end": 9.5, "text": "Hello and welcome..." } ] } Language is auto-detected if you don't specify it — Whisper supports 99 languages out of the box. git clone https://github.com/fashan7/audio-to-text cd audio-to-text python -m venv venv && source venv/bin/activate pip install --upgrade pip setuptools wheel pip install -r requirements.txt python run.py Then open http://localhost:8000/docs and test it right in the browser. React frontend (Lovable) for a proper UI with drag-and-drop upload Progress streaming for long files Deployment guide for Railway/Render The full code is on GitHub: https://github.com/fashan7/audio-to-text Would love feedback — especially if you've dealt with long audio files on CPU and have ideas for speeding things up further!