Thursday, April 16, 2009

Caption Editor for YouTube Videos

CaptionTube is a site that lets create captions for YouTube videos. For example, you can include a transcript of the video in one or more languages and YouTube's search engine will bring more viewers.

The site lets you caption any YouTube video, not just the ones that you've uploaded, and the captions can be exported as an XML file that will be later imported at YouTube.



YouTube's blog mentions that the site has been built by John Skidgel, a user experience designer that works at Google. Another online captioning service created for YouTube is YouTube subtitler, but it's less user-friendly.

PLYMedia's research showed that subtitles increase the amount of time that users spend watching videos by about 40%. "As more and more online video is consumed in an increasing variety of settings—from office environments to noisy bars to mobile phones—it makes sense to add closed-captioning and subtitling features to digital video files. These enhancements expand opportunities for viewers to enjoy online video, even when it's impractical for them to have the sound turned on."

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Caption Editor for YouTube Videos by Alex Chitu
  8 comments ( Post a comment )
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Anonymous Anonymous said on April 16, 2009 1:58 PM PDT:
I sure hope there's an off button, this could get annoying, like pop-up videos on VH1. Not to mention splashing text advertising all over the screen. This would kill YouTube for me.
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Blogger Alex Chitu said on April 16, 2009 2:34 PM PDT:
Unlike annotations, captions are disabled by default.
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Blogger funTomas said on April 17, 2009 1:31 AM PDT:
Exactly what I've been hoping for. Assuming, the optional subtitles will be displayed just underneath the pictures frame, not overlapping it, taking advantage of the electronic media format.
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Anonymous web design tipperary said on April 17, 2009 6:19 AM PDT:
it still does open up a lot possibilities for video mash-ups from the more creative people out there
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Blogger Pat Hawks said on April 17, 2009 10:02 AM PDT:
And it really does bring in a TON of extra viewers.

Especially if you run the captions through Google Translate.
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OpenID overstream said on April 17, 2009 11:09 PM PDT:
Or you could use http://www.overstream.net, a free service that
gives you a very user-friendly editor to caption - and embed -
videos from YouTube, GoogleVideo, DailyMotion, etc.
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Blogger joelpt said on April 18, 2009 8:51 AM PDT:
A bit surprised Google hasn't got automatic subtitling running yet.
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Blogger Alex Chitu said on April 18, 2009 8:54 AM PDT:
Automatic captioning is available as an experiment (limited to political speeches). As you can see, the technology is not solid enough to be used for any kind of video.
What do you think?
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