YouTube Captions are “native” now

Bill Accessibility & Equal Access, Captioned Movie Trailers, Captioned Video, News, Technology, , , ,

As you may have already heard by now, YouTube has CC now.
http://www.youtube.com/blog

This is welcome, and long overdue.
It will accept .srt captions that Overstream creates, so your captions that you have already created can be imported, and used immediately.

But you can only add captions to your own video. This is a big limitation, because I don’t have rights to much of the material that could be captioned, to upload it myself. Digital Millennium Act and such.

So, you can request captions from the authors, and if I caption a video, I can offer it to them to add to their video –

Here’s a couple samples:
Emotiv Press Release (I don’t have the “rights” but I don’t think they’d object)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYfzX2XfoQg

Hallmark Sweet Nothing in My Ear Trailer: (I asked for permission, when they didn’t have enough time to get their trailer captioned)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsCvXS2ZzZs

Notes:

For some reason, my Firefox won’t display them properly, but IE will. Possibly a flash version thing?
My WordPress embeds did not display captions.

23 thoughts on “YouTube Captions are “native” now”

  1. This is great news! Looks like the .sub (SubRip) format is on its way to be the de facto standard for subtitling. I’ll have to write about my subtitling method to create .sub files and hopefully that will help more people create subtitles for their video clips.

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  2. Please do!
    I think you meant .srt (SubRip) was the defacto standard.

    I use .srt for interchange between Overstream, where I create captions for videos with no transcript, and TubeCaption, where I create captions from transcriptions.

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  5. I started it – I somehow dropped the ball. Sorry – I’ll get on that this week, and a couple other requests, and the 5 movie trailers I’m behind on.

    Thanks for the reminder.

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  6. Ya, DEBEDb, and because of that embed problem, you can’t save the captioned version in VodPod either. Maybe they’ll upgrade that later.

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  8. If I do a vblog I subtitle it at the same time. Most vid creators have a subtitling facility don’t they ? how would it be easier to use the youtube version ?

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  9. MM – It depends on your video program. Microsoft’s movie maker just uses “titles”, and there is no export facility.

    I make the videos, upload them, and then caption them with Overstream, export the .srt file, and import it into youtube. So far, that’s the easiest way for me.

    You can also use Subtitle workshop to make the caption files while they are on your hard drive. http://www.urusoft.net/products.php?cat=sw

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  12. I’m a friend and subscriber to A Deaf Mom…….(Karen Putz). Found out about you through her.

    Then I clicked on both links above in both FF and IE but did not see any captioning on either video. Is there a button that I need to click to “activitate” the captioning?

    Also, I have several YouTube videos, a handful of which were captioned at Overstream. I went to one of them to see how I might export Overstream captions to YouTube but didn’t see anything at YouTube allowing that.

    I haven’t gone to Overstream to see if I could import captioning over to YouTube yet – is this what you were talking about in your post?

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  13. You may have to turn the captioning on in the video, buy clickin on the up arrow, and clicking on the red “CC” button.

    I think if you are logged into youtube, it may retain that preference – I know I didn’t have to do it again.

    Yes, you can export the.srt file from Overstream – from your own videos of course.

    Go to Edit Overstream, Click “Tools”, and Click “Export Files as .SRT”, and choose the save to file option.

    Save it, and go to your account (again, you can only add subtitles to your own videos), select the video you want to edit, click on “edit captions and subtitles”

    Use the “choose” to select the file you just saved, add a random name, and select the language.

    Press Upload.

    If you have more trouble let me know – maybe a can make or find a good “tutorial” on it.

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  14. I would love to get a music video by ‘Fleetwood Mac’ onto my blog because my daughter’s name is part of that song “Rhiannon”.

    Thanks,
    DS

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  16. There is a great new service by http://www.subply.com, promoting captioning in YouTube. They offer professionally produced closed captions in English and Spanish subtitles FREE OF CHARGE!!! within 24 hours you get the SRT file as well as en embed code you can use anywhere! they are amazing!

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  18. Mac users can use MovCaptioner to create .SUB and .SRT files quickly and easily for use with YouTube. Cost for s/w is only $25. Go to http://www.synchrimedia.com to download the demo version.

    I think it’s a great idea to volunteer to caption videos for other video owners! Many people just don’t have the time or the know-how to do it themselves.

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  19. You can certainly caption any of my 700 videos. It would be fun to caption my most popular ones. But I simply don’t understand how to make a .SUB or .SRT file manually… -Nalts (Youtube.com/nalts)

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