Supported files
The audio, video, subtitle, and transcript formats Bristlenose reads.
Bristlenose reads a folder of files and works out which belong together. You can mix audio, video, subtitles, and transcripts in the same folder.
Accepted formats
| Type | Extensions |
|---|---|
| Audio | .wav .mp3 .m4a .flac .ogg .wma .aac .aiff .aif .caf |
| Video | .mp4 .m4v .mov .avi .mkv .webm .wmv .asf .mts .m2ts .3gp .flv .mpg .mpeg |
| Subtitles | .srt .vtt |
| Transcripts | .docx (as exported by Zoom, Teams, or Google Meet) |
The video list covers what participants and older recorders actually send:
Windows Movie Maker's .wmv, camcorder AVCHD .mts and .m2ts, phone .3gp,
and the .mpg/.mpeg that comes off a DVD rip.
Files outside the list
A file Bristlenose does not accept is named in the run output with the reason, rather than dropped quietly — a count alone would not tell you which participant was missing. The same is true of a file it accepts but cannot read: a truncated download or a recording with no audio track is reported and the rest of the folder is analysed.
Bristlenose looks in the folder you point it at and two levels of subfolders
below it, so study/week-1/session-3/ is reached without flattening anything.
It will not take a whole drive: pointing it at a filesystem root, your home
folder, or a system folder is refused by name.
How files become sessions
Files that share a name stem are treated as one session. For example, p1.mp4 and p1.srt are the same session — Bristlenose uses the video for playback and the subtitle for the transcript.
When a session already has a subtitle or transcript, transcription is skipped for it. This is faster and uses no transcription model.
Platform-specific filename suffixes from Zoom, Teams, and Google Meet are stripped before stems are compared, so files exported by those tools group correctly without renaming.
.txt transcripts are read by the bristlenose analyze command, which works from existing transcript files. They are not picked up by run or transcribe, which scan for media and the formats listed above.