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How to Upload Captions to Your YouTube Video

March 10, 2011, 11:09 am

By George Williams

In previous posts, I’ve written about how to make videos accessible with Universal Subtitles or with CaptionTube. And having decided that Universal Subtitles provides the better interface for creating captions, I also published a screencast explaining how to use the service. There’s one small hitch, though: if your video is hosted on YouTube, where many potential viewers will be able to find it, but your captions are hosted at Universal Subtitles, then your YouTube viewers won’t be able to take advantage of the captions you’ve created. What to do? Fortunately, it’s easy enough to download the captions you’ve created and upload them to your YouTube video. Let me show you.

This tutorial assumes you’ve already created captions using Universal Subtitles (remember the screencast?). The steps below show you how to download them from Universal Subtitles and then upload them to the YouTube video for which the subtitles were created.

Step 1: From UniversalSubtitles.org page, select the captions you want to download

Step 2: Select "Download Subtitles"

Step 3: Choose the "SRT" format and download to your hard drive

Step 4: On the YouTube video page, select "Edit captions/subtitles"

Step 5: Select "Add New Captions or Transcript"

Step 6: Select "Choose File"

Step 7: Select the file from your hard drive and click "Choose"

Step 8: Select "Upload file"

Done! You now have an "Available Caption Track" embedded in your YouTube video.

And if you’d like to see these particular captions in action, you can go watch the YouTube video.

Have some experience creating and embedding captions? What tools and methods do you use? Let us hear from you in the comments!

[Creative Commons-licensed flickr photo by ghwpix]

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  • http://billso.com/ Bill Sodeman

    Excellent workflow in this article. I did something similar with YouTube autotranslation and captions in a graduate seminar I taught a year ago.

  • elle82

    I am not a crowd-sourcing expert, so this may be way off the mark, but: the first thing I thought when reading this article is that crowd-sourcing gets volunteers to do jobs for free that may otherwise be paid positions. With our current high unemployment rates, should we balance the public good of having transcriptions of valuable historical documents with the good of employing more people, even if it means the documents are transcribed at a much slower pace due to lack of funding?

  • johnct

    In an ideal world libraries and universities would be funded to undertake such valuable work, but it aint gonna happen soon. The National Library of Australia’s newspaper digitisation project at http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper uses crowdsourcing successfully to correct OCR text. Some individuals have corrected over 500,000 lines of text each. Mostly coordinated by volunteers with some supervision by paid staff. Many volunteers develop (or already have) valuable skills in transcription and interpretation.

    Good article about it at http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march10/holley/03holley.html

  • drjeff

    …and if the transcriptions are any good at all (and the article indicates they are), they will be perfectly useful for finding the right document.  Once found, a researcher will probably want to look at the original anyway, no?

    I would suggest that volunteers could do the cleanup/checking, as well.  It would not be a hard thing to establish a scoring system for volunteers, with staff members checking just enough of their work to score them.  It could be dramatically less labor-intensive for the professionals, if well handled.

    There’s also the issue of acceptance of risk.  If you’re so risk-averse that you must have a professional check every word of every transcript, I would suggest that it’s completely inappropriate in this setting.  (I.E., if I were in charge, and someone suggested that, I would suspect them of trying to sabotage the project by burdening it with ridiculous costs.)  No building will fall down, and no-one will die if there’s an incorrect word in a transcript.  Sheesh.

  • drjeff

    Thus, we should outlaw all hobbies: if my daughter knits, it takes work away from a blanket-maker.  If I help my neighbor with her email, it steals $150 from the Geek Squad.  If you take in a stray, it reduces the need for dogcatchers and poison.

    To really follow this thought to its logical conclusion, we would have to establish “virtue squads” to search out and stop any instance of anyone doing anything for anyone else without compensation.  Maybe we’d get lucky, and they’d allow an exception for relatives.

    Please think about this until you see what I’m saying here.  It’s important.

    Paying people to do busy work (or, equivalently, work you could get done for free) just means there’s less money left to pay people to do worthwhile things. Your attitude is EXTREMELY dangerous to our country (on account of the large number of people who have it.)

    Wikipedia link that briefly explains the basic economics of the situation: http://bit.ly/9dcB

  • mmcferrin1616

    I would agree, if this was simply busywork. Contributions to the historical record, however, should be treated with more care than a daily Sudoku or crossword puzzle. They should not be used simply to keep idle hands at work.

    Your comparison is flawed in that the hobbyist performs a task solely for his/her own enjoyment. Your daughter should feel free to knit to her heart’s content for herself and those around her, no one is stopping her. In the context of this issue, however, she would not simply be knitting for herself; her knitted wares would be on the shelf for public consumption next to professionally knitted work with no indication as to their origin. Additionally, since we are unaware of her knitting skill, a professional knitter would have to be employed to check and repair her work. This process, as the article admits, can take more time and effort than if the professional had undertaken the task at the outset.

    If one wishes to volunteer at a historical society and receive the proper training, by all means do so, but don’t sacrifice accuracy and reliability for speed.

  • mbelvadi

    “don’t sacrifice accuracy and reliability for speed” – it’s not a case of speed, so much as getting the job done at all. I’d rather have mostly (but not perfectly) accurate and mostly reliable rather than have .

  • drjeff

    mmcferrin1616-

    Did you write your response intending it to be parody?  It reads like parody.

    If my daughter knits a blanket and gives it to a friend who had a baby, it means that the friend doesn’t have to buy one.  The friend will look at it, and decide whether it’s the sort of blanket she will use.  Done; end of story.  No expert will be hired, I can assure you.

    Constructing an impossibly complex edifice around the most basic of transactions is the sort of behavior that leads to academics being seen as ridiculous by the general public; right now, I’m a little sympathetic to that view..

  • drjeff

    Amen. 

    Independent studies tell us that the overall quality of Wikipedia is equal to that of Encyclopedia Britannica.  (Yes, there’s some trolling, spamming and graffiti, but overall…)

  • 22215614

    If it works like ours does the public never sees the transcript, it is the “hidden search engine”, they type in a search and the original image appears.  The transcript is there and if someone really goes looking they can probably find it, but that isn’t the intent.  The transcript is to provide the search terms in computer searchable format.

  • oscarw

    Interestingly, neither the author of the update on the War Department papers nor the readers mention a very frustrating characteristic of the software. I put in one to two hours a night when I could and then picked up where I left off. The software did not respect my margins. That is, the document only had so many words and spaces per line of script. To make checking my work easier, I thought, I ended a line where the holographic version ended. A scholar could easily either correct what I had read and written simply by comparing line of text to line of original. Not the finished product. The computer continued into whatever space was left on its own lines. 
    Worse was going back to my work some days or even weeks later, the transcription was gone!  (Yes, I did hit the software’s “save”  button.)
    Worst? No response to e-mails I sent to the project managers about this problem of vanishing work. I was not expecting instantaneous responses. I got none at all.
    Disappointed, I stopped wasting my time and eyes. But, it was interesting reading.  

  • http://twitter.com/grwebguy Bill Creswell

    I use dotSUB for captionfish.com and Universal Subtitles for miscellaneous titles.
    http://billcreswell.wordpress.com/2011/06/28/how-to-start-adding-captionssubtitles-to-online-videos/

  • schultzjc

    The author presents the key problem and the resolution in one paragraph:  

     

    “The definition of a student credit hour has long been an elusive
    matter, with most persons agreeing that “clock hours”—actual minutes in formal
    instruction—is at best an crude proxy for the effort and extent of learning
    involved in courses. This is doubly true in a world of online education,
    collaborative learning ventures, etc. But the big issue here is: why shouldn’t
    this matter be left to others, such as the states with respect to funded public
    universities, or to the accrediting agencies?”

     

    Why?
     because there is no agreed-upon definition of credit hour that extends across state lines or even among institutions.  That creates all sorts of
    problem, which the author seems to understand.  In case he doesn’t, among
    these is the difficulty of transferring credits from one place to another.
     Another is schools that have grossly different standards.  So…if
    this is a problem that needs correcting, how is correcting it – which the
    proposed legislation does – “another case of regulatory overreach”?
    Why should managing this be legislated? Because universities can’t manage
    themselves, at the expense of the student.  Does Vedder have some other
    agenda?  

  • cragie

    Simple way for postsecondary institutions to avoid these regs:  Don’t
    participate in Title IV aid:  Pell Grants, TEACH, ACG, Direct Loan,
    work-study, SEOG and Perkins Loan.  Organizations always want the
    benefits (cash) but not the responsibilities (program oversight, program
    integrity, red tape) of free money from govt.  While postsec
    institutions accepting such aid are regulated, they are underregulated
    compared with other segments of the American economy.  There are even
    some companies that don’t receive any govt programs money that are more
    heavily regulated than Title IV institutions.

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