Viewing Captioned Videos on Google Video
July 3, 2007
Google Video — a close cousin of the more well-known YouTube service — has a feature where it can display closed captions. And you can turn the captions on or off just by pressing the “CC” button. Niiiice.
Here’s a list of selected videos with captions. Clicking on any of the videos on this list displays the video on a separate page (with video screens a bit larger than YouTube’s videos, I should mention) — with captions turned on by default at the bottom. Clicking on the “CC” button at the bottom turns captions off if needed.
Here’s the announcement by a deaf Google employee of this captioning functionality, from nearly a year ago. A Google help page explains how to add captions / subtitles to your video; this is actually done via a separate file created by a program much like Subtitle Workshop and which is already being done for the shows we see on television. Hopefully more and more content providers will upload these separate captioning files along with the shows and clips being sent to Google Video.
Nice to see a major video website provider with this type of functionality. Hope the others implement this as well.
July 3, 2007 at 7:09 pm
Now if I could export my overstream titles as .SRT….
July 4, 2007 at 8:29 am
Bill — I got into touch with the administrator of Overstream about being able to export subtitles into a .srt file. He said there have been requests for this option, and this option (and a full-screen video view) is at the top of the list of things for him to do. He’s been swamped doing stuff for another start-up he’s doing, has a conference coming up, lots other stuff. But he said he’ll get to this when things lighten up!
He asked a good question: should there be any “mark-ups” (I assume rich text / HTML features like colors and font styles?) exported as well into the .srt file? He has a forum thread going on about this at the following link:
http://www.overstream.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=65
Stay tuned! When this feature goes live, I’ll be sure to announce it as well.
July 19, 2007 at 5:53 am
you can change srt to video.google code at http://www.subtitle-horse.org - there you can also find a program, to create subtitles for video.google….