Thousands of Captioned and Subtitled Videos Rendered Unusable by YouTube
March 20, 2010
Oversteam.net, provider of online captioning and subtitling tool that overlays captions on top of YouTube, has been blocked from using YouTube videos.
It is unclear whether this is a blocking of all third party videos, or just Overstream. If anyone has any specifics, please post.
[Edit:3/21 - Looking at whether this may be an api change that Overstream did not account for]
Anyhow, the net result is that hundreds of captioned movie trailers, and thousands of subtitles in many languages, are rendered useless.
Thanks for the warning, YouTube.
Working on getting movie trailers up somewhere else.
For now, try TrailerSpy or dotSUB.
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Is there anything we can do? Complain to youtube? Where/how?
I have put the questions on YouTube forums, but I have no idea.
Can’t you just use youTube’s captioning engine instead, now they have captioning ability? This way, all videos are searchable.
Nope, unfortunately you can only caption the videos you upload. That would be preferable, if they allowed others to add captions….
I have created several translated Overstreams, and Youtube’s tools can NOT achieve the same quality. I captioned videos with simultaneous transliterations AND English captions which usually appeared below widescreen video without overlaying it on my website at http://babelsongs.com all of which have stopped working. Other copyright owners have been thrilled with the work I have done. Does anyone know exactly what has changed or why?
I’m still looking for answers. I did see that there was a YouTube API changed announced, http://apiblog.youtube.com/2010/03/upcoming-change-to-youtube-video-page.html, so that may have broken something.
There is more information on the Overstream forum http://www.overstream.net/forum/viewtopic.php?p=1113#1113
‘What YouTube has now blocked is the ability for one entity (server) to request the video page content, and another enitity (viewer’s computer) to play the resulting video stream. They could make a special exception for overstream’s server to allow overstream to exist.
Technically speaking, our approach likely does violate YouTube’s ToS. ‘
So it’s not likely that Overstreams YouTube ability will be returning anytime soon.
Overstream’s administrator has posted an expalanation: YouTube’s shifting APIs have now blocked the ability for one entity (Overstream’s server) to request the video content, and another enitity (viewer’s computer) to play the stream (likely to block downloading sites). Overstream still works with other video sites, and Youtube could still make a special exception for Overstream’s server, they SHOULD whitelist it, but I’m not counting on it. A few people have mentioned the problem with Overstream in Youtube forums and on Youtube’s recent blog post bragging about their captioning features http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2010/03/future-will-be-captioned-improving.html I’m looking for folks to email at Youtube.
So that’s why it wouldn’t let me import new videos yesterday. This really sucks. I have been captioning YouTube videos for CaptVids.com, and I have been using Overstream’s tool. It’s the only captioning tool that seems to work best for me, and now I can’t use it anymore. I guess YouTube wants people to just use their automaticly transcribed captions, which does a terrible job.
DotSUB has made some improvements, and you can caption and advance the movie with keystrokes. I’ve started to move my stuff there.
What program do you use to caption videos, Bill? If overstream stays like this for a long time, I’d like to know of a good captioning tool to replace it.
I am using dotSUB online (http://dotSUB.com) and gnome subtitles offline.
There is also a new version of Magpie that works with MP4Box, and will create closed captioning for Blackberry OS 5.0