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September 19, 2006

Captions on Google Video


Google Video tries to promote captions and features a small list of videos that have captions. Although adding video captions was available in the video status section, I didn't see any video with captions until today.

It's really strange that Google supports only SubViewer (*.SUB) and SubRip (*.SRT) formats, instead of focusing on professional formats used in television, for example. Most people who upload their videos won't take the time to create subtitles, as this requires a software and it's not very easy to do.

Some speech recognition combined with an automated translation software would be really useful in this area. Or at least a collaborative captioning system, similar to the way volunteers translate Google interface.

7 comments:

  1. "Most people who upload their videos won't take the time to create subtitles, as this requires a software and it's not very easy to do."

    I think Google's lightbulb blinked on and its wheels are a turnin' after reading that opinion.

    Hmm.. can they make it easier?

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  2. HA! I suggested that a time ago...
    They responded to me that at the moment they were not thinking about putting subtitles, seems that now it is the moment.

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  3. Hm, why Google add .SRT support, when it (still) doesnt work. Subtitles are showed incorectly. Example:
    http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4984135346671490928

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  4. Here's what they see from the transcript in a XML version:
    http://video.google.com/videotranscript?docid=-4984135346671490928

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  5. Great feature.
    I had been waiting for it for a long time.
    http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8226581489861733163
    (Multilanguage captioning)
    http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6789710328672031046

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  6. Why can't we search videos with captions yet? C'mon Google, the deaf community are crying for this.

    ReplyDelete
  7. You can search for videos with captions. For example, try this search. The second result has a CC icon that means it has captions and also a link that says "Start playing at search term" (when your query was first found in the video).

    ReplyDelete