remotion-dev/remotion · error · Error

${path}.confidence must be a finite number or null.

Error message

${path}.confidence must be a finite number or null.

What it means

parseCaptionFile allows the optional confidence field to be either null or a finite number; NaN, Infinity, or non-numeric values are rejected. Fires while validating an indexed caption in the loaded captions JSON, before the 0-1 range check.

Source

Thrown at packages/studio/src/components/parse-caption-file.ts:63

		if (!isFiniteNumber(caption.startMs) || caption.startMs < 0) {
			throw new Error(`${path}.startMs must be a finite, non-negative number.`);
		}

		if (!isFiniteNumber(caption.endMs) || caption.endMs < 0) {
			throw new Error(`${path}.endMs must be a finite, non-negative number.`);
		}

		if (caption.endMs < caption.startMs) {
			throw new Error(`${path}.endMs must not be earlier than startMs.`);
		}

		if (caption.timestampMs !== null && !isFiniteNumber(caption.timestampMs)) {
			throw new Error(`${path}.timestampMs must be a finite number or null.`);
		}

		if (caption.confidence !== null && !isFiniteNumber(caption.confidence)) {
			throw new Error(`${path}.confidence must be a finite number or null.`);
		}

		if (
			typeof caption.confidence === 'number' &&
			(caption.confidence < 0 || caption.confidence > 1)
		) {
			throw new Error(`${path}.confidence must be between 0 and 1.`);
		}

		if (
			caption.pageBreakAfter !== undefined &&
			typeof caption.pageBreakAfter !== 'boolean'
		) {
			throw new Error(
				`${path}.pageBreakAfter must be a boolean when provided.`,
			);
		}

View on GitHub (pinned to b2f4e34732)

Solutions

  1. Convert confidence to a number, e.g. "95%" -> 0.95
  2. Set confidence to null when unknown
  3. Fix NaN-producing code in the export pipeline

Example fix

// before
{"text": "hi", "startMs": 0, "endMs": 1000, "confidence": "high"}
// after
{"text": "hi", "startMs": 0, "endMs": 1000, "confidence": 0.97}
Defensive patterns

Strategy: type-guard

Validate before calling

for (const [i, c] of parsed.entries()) {
  const conf = (c as any).confidence;
  if (conf !== null && conf !== undefined && (typeof conf !== 'number' || !Number.isFinite(conf))) {
    throw new Error(`captions[${i}].confidence must be a finite number or null`);
  }
}

Type guard

const isValidConfidence = (v: unknown): v is number | null | undefined =>
  v === null || v === undefined || (typeof v === 'number' && Number.isFinite(v));

Try / catch

try {
  const captions = parseCaptionFile({fileName, contents});
} catch (e) {
  // coerce labels like "high"/"95%" to numbers or null, retry
}

Prevention

When it happens

Trigger: captions[i].confidence is "0.95" (string), true, NaN, or Infinity — caught by caption.confidence !== null && !isFiniteNumber(caption.confidence).

Common situations: ASR tools exporting confidence as a percentage string ("95%") or a qualitative label ("high"); NaN from failed parsing before serialization.

Understand the failure class

Background: Type mismatch errors: IllegalArgumentException, TypeError and type guards across 150 open-source libraries — this error's family across 150 libraries.

Related errors


AI-assisted analysis of remotion-dev/remotion@b2f4e34732 (2026-09-09). Data as JSON: /api/errors/3403a25f1856f2b7. Report an issue: GitHub.