feat(ui): add the full player's Transcript panel - #478

Why

A listener can now read, search and play from an episode's published transcript inside the full player, without writing a note first. The panel follows the line being spoken, plays from any line, and saves the same note the "Transcribe current episode" command writes. Episodes without a published transcript offer the paid transcription in one tap. Refs #348.

What changed

• TranscriptPanel is a third player panel between Chapters and Up next. It loads the transcript through TRANS1's own findPublishedTranscript and fetchPublishedTranscript and groups cues into sentence-sized lines with the note's groupCues under shorter limits (5 s soft, 30 s hard). There is no second parser and no second grouper.
• Save as note runs the "Transcribe current episode" path with its paid fallback turned off (transcribeCurrentEpisode({ paid: false })), so the note is the command's note byte for byte and the Free button never sends audio to a provider. "Transcribe with OpenAI" runs the from-audio command. Deepgram users see "Transcribe with Deepgram".
• fetchPublishedTranscript now redacts the transcript text where it is fetched. It hides the private feed's address, and the transcript's own address when that carries a credential, by the fix(feeds): keep private subscriptions working across devices #428, feat(feeds): protect documented private feed addresses #440 and fix(privacy): keep private feed addresses out of generated notes #454 detection. The note and the panel read that one result, so neither keeps its own sanitizer.
• The gzip budget in scripts/size.mjs rises from 100,000 to 103,000.

Scope

• Covers the brief's head (source label, Find, Save as note), lines (speakers, times, highlight, follow, Follow chip, tap to play), untimed paragraphs, loading, error with Retry, and the no-transcript state with the paid button.
• The paid result does not show in the panel. Plain Whisper returns untimed text, not timed segments, so the existing path opens the saved note, as it does today.
• It leaves out reading a paid transcript note back into the panel, and an "Open transcript" button once a note exists. See Follow-ups.

Tradeoffs

• Lines are sentence-sized groups, not raw cues or the note's paragraphs. On the real 2 h 55 min No Agenda 1910 SRT (2,799 cues), raw cues give 2,799 half-sentence rows, the note's paragraphs give 207 rows with a 53 s median, and these limits give 457 rows with a 25 s median, 64% ending on a sentence. Word-level JSON (8,792 cues) gives 354 rows, all ending on a sentence. The prototype's 38:01 and 38:07 cues therefore read as one line.
• Follow stops on any user scroll, detected by a scroll position the panel did not set, instead of "current line still in view". The in-view rule pulls a reader who scrolls up a little back down on the next line.
• A failed feed lookup shows Retry, not the paid button, so nobody is offered payment because the network blinked. An episode the cached feed lists without a transcript still shows the paid button.
• One cached transcript, keyed by episode, so switching panels does not refetch or flash. Save as note fetches again through the command's path, which keeps the service stateless.

Size

The owner approved the panel on 2026-10-14: "This is an incredible feature that's well worth 1.9 KB." It measures +2,576 gzip at the feature commit and +2,691 against the current master after review (99,056 to 101,747). The extra roughly 700 bytes over the estimate, and the budget of 103,000 rather than 102,000, are a coordinator decision to keep Find and the Follow chip and to leave room for fixes in flight.

Blast radius

The change adds one panel and touches the player's panel list, Escape order and shared row style. Chapters now shares its row rules with transcript lines, and the view's Escape closes Find before it collapses the player. On phones every panel head control is now at least 44 px tall, including Up next's Edit. renderTranscriptBody no longer redacts, because its input arrives redacted. Outside the panel's files: IPodNotes gains getTranscriptionService(), TranscriptionService.transcribeCurrentEpisode gains a paid option (default unchanged, so the command behaves as before), IconType gains captions (type only), the verify skill gains a transcript screens state, and AGENTS.md states the new budget. No data.json, IAPI or URI change.

Verification

• Real Obsidian 1.14.4, Linux (isolated vault), with the journeys in tests/e2e/journey-transcript.test.ts. The timed journey plays and sees the current line advance, taps a line and keeps playing from it, finds "PALACE" (marks, Enter moves the hit, Escape closes Find and keeps the player open), then checks that the note Save as note writes is identical to the note the command writes. A second journey shows the paid button, and a third disables it offline. All three fail on master at "Timed out waiting for player panel Transcript" and pass on this branch.
• npm run test:e2e on a fresh vault passes at the final head, 197 tests in 27 files. npm run lint, format:check, typecheck, build, test (124 files, 2,606 tests), test:tooling (13), docs:build: all pass on the final head. Node 22.23.2.
• The command's note and Save as note's note are byte-identical to master's for a public feed's VTT, SRT, JSON, HTML and plain text transcript.
• In Obsidian, a private feed whose transcript quotes its own ?token= address and the feed's address shows neither in the panel or the saved note. On a 390 x 844 phone, Save, the Find field, Follow and Up next's Edit measure 44 px.
• Performance, measured in that Obsidian under Xvfb at pane width:
  • Real 2 h 55 min SRT (457 lines, 152 KB of text). Cold open is 106-149 ms, including the fetch from a local server, parse and render. Reopen from Up next is 43-59 ms.
  • A line change costs 7.7-8 ms of main-thread work, against 1.7 ms for the same seek with Up next. The current line lands at one third of the list, and no long task occurs across 40 line changes.
  • During steady playback a trace shows the main thread busy 9% of the time, with the largest frame task at 3.6 ms.
  • Very large hostile transcripts render slowly in Reading view #437's hostile 2 MB transcript (1,024 lines of 2,000 characters) opens in 535-714 ms cold and 203-226 ms warm, and follows at 10.4 ms per line. Reading view shows the same text after 5.4-8.6 s. No virtualization.

Mutations (standing order 32)

Each wrong alternative was planted, failed the named test, and was reverted.

Screens

320, 820 and 390 in light and dark, each beside the prototype:

	Light	Dark
Sidebar 320
Pane 820
Phone 390
Find
Follow chip, no transcript, offline

Follow, tap to play, scroll away and Follow, then Find "walk" with Enter and Escape, in Obsidian 1.14.4: screen recording (frames).

Docs at release

• In docs/src/content/docs/podcasts.md, "Play an episode", add a Transcript bullet. It shows the feed's transcript. Select a line to play from it, Find filters the lines, Save as note writes the transcript note, and Follow returns to the line being spoken.
• In docs/src/content/docs/transcripts.md, add a section on reading a feed's transcript in the player (Feed transcript, Free), and say that without one the panel offers Transcribe with OpenAI (or Deepgram), marked Paid, for audio episodes while online.
• In docs/src/content/docs/transcripts.md, "Limits and error messages", say that the transcript of a feed that publishes one has timestamps. Pair this line with TRANS1's docs.

Follow-ups

• The "Transcribe current episode" command still takes the paid path when its feed lookup fails and a key is set. That is TRANS1's behavior, and the panel no longer shares it. Both reviewers suggest the root fix: findPublishedTranscript reports "could not look" apart from "found none", and FeedRepository.load resolves false for an unavailable private address. The panel's own check could then go.
• The command hides itself for video, while the panel's Save works for a video's published transcript. Moving the audio check into the service's audio branch would let the command match.
• J-TR-04 says the panel shows an existing transcript note and Save as note opens it. Today the command refuses with a notice when the note exists.
• Steady playback with the panel open showed 20-35 ms frame gaps under Xvfb's software compositing that the main-thread trace does not explain. One session traced about 4 ms per frame in Chromium's selection-bounds update walking the list. Profile on GPU hardware before reaching for virtualization.