Webware

Over the weekend, YouTube introduced a new feature to help make captioned or subtitled videos more accessible to international users. The new system uses machine translation to convert any of these videos into your language of choice in real time.

To access this feature, users simply need to turn it on from the lower-right corner of the player. From there, they can use a simple drop-down menu to pick which language into which they want the video translated. Unfortunately, YouTube won't remember a user's translation choices from one video to the next, but this seems like a feature that could be added down the line.

Set what language you want subtitled videos to play in with YouTube's new on-the-fly translate service.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

What's impressive is how many languages the new system supports. It's using the same translation tools from Google Translate, so you've got 36 different languages from which to choose. Of course, all of this relies on the video source having captions in the first place; an overwhelming majority don't.

My dream, albeit just a dream, is to have YouTube use speech-to-text conversion on all its videos to make this an automatic process, since creating properly timed subtitles for long-form videos is a pain.

To give it a spin, try it on this video where you can see Robocop play Shogi (Japanese chess) with lasers.

In a move to make videos easier to understand without volume or for the hard of hearing, YouTube has given users the option of embedding closed captions that show up as semitransparent overlays. Caption files that have text dialogue synced up to the proper timestamps can be uploaded during the time of upload or afterwards, and YouTube has provided multiple language support to let viewers swap between different languages of a single video without having to leave playback.

Videos with closed captioning have it as an option in the lower right-hand corner menu; a part of the user interface that also houses the toggle to turn video annotations on and off. Even with the inclusion of closed captions you can continue to keep annotations enabled, although the two may overlap if annotations have been ledged on the bottom of the screen.

Videos with closed captions appear as on-screen overlays. You can also swap between multiple languages if the video author has provided that as part of the file.

(Credit: CBS Interactive)

For now closed captions can only be seen on YouTube. Embeds do not yet have the option to have them toggled on, just like annotations are not yet available.

Also, no news yet on if this feature will be making its way to mobile versions of the site, particularly the iPhone application which does not yet have support for YouTube's warp or on-screen annotation features. Considering that the iPod Touch does not have an external speaker built-in, having closed captions on the go could make for a much richer mobile experience.

There's already a small handful of content providers including closed captioning in their videos, including CNET, MIT, and the BBC. Of the bunch I think the most useful is for video lectures, although for non-native language speakers, seeing a video in your own language (if available) is pretty darn useful. If you want to see it in action go check out this episode of Blassreiter which is entirely in Japanese--and awesome.

Have you ever produced a video without adding captions simply because you didn't want to bother using your video editor's clunky, built-in captioning tools? Better yet, want to add captions to someone else's video? Check out Overstream, a service that lets you add text captions to videos from a handful of hosting sites including the big two: YouTube and Google Video.

Diving right in to captioning a video is simple. Once you've given Overstream the URL, it sends you to the Flash-based editor, which at first glance may look complicated, but is about as simple as it gets. If you're used to the timeline controls of any old video player you'll feel right at home--just pick the spot of video where you want to add a caption and start typing away. Overstream will automatically add each caption as a 3-second chunk. If you need to make it shorter or longer, there are toggle controls you can dial up or down, and buttons to send it right next to the neighboring caption.

Additionally, you can see exactly where the caption will end in a color-coded bar that sits below the video's timeline, and tweaking it down to the exact half second or so requires no technical knowhow whatsoever; just drag the bar to the part of the video you want. When finished with any additions you can kick the video back out to Overstream, where it'll be hosted from its original service provider (via embed) while overlaying the captions you've created below.

While Miss South Carolina might not have made a whole lot of sense, Overstream's captioning tools do, and are easy enough that a total newbie can figure them out.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

To test the service, I used the infamous video of Miss South Carolina butchering the question about map proficiency in the United States, and adding captions to the 48-second clip took a matter of minutes. Larger dialogue-heavy segments will certainly take longer, but the editor supports as many captions as you're able to fit. You can view the finished product here.

There are several other captioning services that have done this including BubblePLY, Viddler, and several that have closed up shop including Click.TV and Mojiti. More tech-savvy folks should also give JumpCut a spin, which can do captions on top of its basic video-editing tools.

[via gHacks via DownloadSquad]