YouTube auto-captioning for video

By Bryan, on March 9th, 2010

Several people have asked in the past about transcriptions/closed-captioning for video. It’s a pain in the butt, but YouTube has just rolled out a promising new time-saving feature called auto-captioning.

Like any machine-generated transcription, some words get garbled. But if you have a video that has good audio from an interview (external mics!), and there’s not a lot of background noise, it’s useful. You can also use it on videos that have already been uploaded to the service. In your account, under “Captions and Subtitles” download the
English machine transcription file (it will be named “captions.sbv”) and you can edit the transcript in a text editor like TextWrangler, then upload the file back up to YouTube.

You can see the results in this video:

I spent 10 minutes total figuring out how it worked, tweaking the .sbv file, and reuploading.

Pretty neat, I think

Here’s a deeper explanation in a TechCrunch story about some of the limitations.

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auto body lexington 5 months ago 1 point
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Great tool indeed. Sometimes I have a hard time listening clearly because the audio quality is terrible. Because of this we don't need extra tool just to caption a video. Youtube does this thing. Awesome technology.

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laurenmichell 5 months ago 1 point
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Bryan, this is huge for news sites. One limitation I was worried about as a multimedia editor (and of which I was glad to escape upon gradating and passing the torch) was web accessibility. I understand the need to make content available to everyone equally, but before it was so impractical to close caption video. I spent a good hour captioning four minutes of video in Premiere, which makes no sense for breaking news. Univerisities are really starting to crack down on accessibility standards, too, which will inevitably impact student newsorgs.

But this tool is great, even if imperfect. I'm sure it'll get better with time. Thanks for sharing.

Next tool that needs to be invented: A simple way for making flash accessible. HTML5?

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