YouTube Finally Adds Closed Captions
August 28, 2008
Long-time readers of my blog may remember that I had a series of posts explaining how to caption your videos and recommending that they be posted onto Google Video — at that time the only “major” video host that supported .srt files (where closed captions are stored).
YouTube, ironically also owned by Google, finally added the ability to upload .srt (and its sister .sub) files and to turn on / off captions.
Read my post on my preferred method of creating captions and then saving captioned videos onto Google Video — which should be similar to how you can save these to YouTube as well.
Google Operating System has more information on this — rather than repeat everything, head over there for an excellent synopsis.
Way to go, Google! Now only if it improves its speech-to-text capabilities as well.
(Thanks, Google Operating System!)
August 28, 2008 at 2:08 pm
*Does happy dance*
August 28, 2008 at 8:40 pm
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August 29, 2008 at 6:12 am
None of the videos has actually worked for me – they stop playing after the first caption. Hmm.
August 29, 2008 at 9:46 am
For individual account from YouTube, to create closed captions is lot of work. It’s more like not everybody will do that. Maybe the bigger sponsor who wish to promotion their “ads” is more like willing put CC as well. I guess.
August 30, 2008 at 4:14 am
Geek, thanks so much for all the information you put out here.
Are you saying if I put a video on You Tube, caption it, and then take it out and put it on say, my own website, it will still be captioned? If so, I will go sign up for an account.
Otherwise, I’ve been looking into MAGpie, SMIL & RT files and all that stuff and giving myself such a headache about it. I got it figured out up to the point where I attempt to combine and video and text tracks together to work in a player. Then only one or the other works. :(
Or would it be better I check out your recommendation on overstream?
Again, thanks so much for sharing your knowledge.
September 18, 2008 at 3:38 pm
hey there,
i too always disliked the fact that subtitles were never really seen as a needed feature in all those web-based players. adding subs to a video is easy if the right tools are being used. i subtitle videos all the time with urusoft’s subtitle workshop. it’s free and comfortable to use.
anyway, a slight inaccuracy in your article: google video wasn’t the only supporter of subs, let alone the first. stage6, which is now defunct, supported this feature very early on in 2006 along with high quality divx-video. the great thing was that the videos could be downloaded with subs included, while youtube doesn’t even officially offer this feature. if you manage to download the video anyway, then the subs are not present. same goes for the high-quality version of the videos which don’t show subs at all. this might be a temporary issue, seeing that this feature is still in beta stage. still, it takes a big deal of greatness out of that feature.