I'd Rather Be Writing » youtube

Adding Captions to Youtube Videos

Tom Johnson — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 01:35:36 +0000

In Buying Power of Persons with Disabilities, Karl Grove carefully analyzes statistics about the number of users who need your site to be accessible. Despite noting that some of the statistics could be overinflated, he still advocates for accessibility:

In some cases, persons with disabilities which require an accessible site can amount to 7-10% of your potential visitors. Can you afford to lose 7-10% of your website’s visitors? Or, put another way, would you like to gain an additional 7-10% more users? Make an accessible web experience and publicize it well and you may capture some of them and see some direct ROI from accessibility.

Today I was uploading some instructional videos that our audiovisual crew put together. Were it not for the constant reminders that people from Accessibility SIG relay to me, I probably wouldn’t have done anything to make the videos more accessible. But it turns out that making videos accessible on Youtube for hearing-disabled people is quite easy, since in most cases, corporate-produced videos already have transcripts.

Youtube makes it really easy to sync the transcript with voice. When you upload the transcript in the video’s settings, Google’s voice recognition software automatically matches up the words with the video timeline, syncing the two. It’s so easy that neglecting to upload the transcript for a Youtube video (if you have it) is downright lazy.

Here’s an example of that captioning. Click the CC button in the video bar.

In my particular case, I don’t know how many disabled users will need the captioning, but given our worldwide audience, the captions may ease the fact that the videos aren’t yet translated into 10 other languages. People who don’t speak English might be able to read English, or through a mix of the two (reading and listening) might get a better understanding of what’s going on. That alone is a case for making the videos more accessible.

I know there’s more to video accessibility than just adding captions, but captions are a great start — and so easy.

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Podcast: Finding and Creating Relevant Content — Strategies for Social Media

Tom Johnson — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 06:21:18 +0000

Download MP3
Length: 70 min.

In the barrage of information created by all the social media channels, how can you find relevant content? How can you move past forms of noise to actually produce content that engages users? What forms of social media do students respond to the most? These are some of the questions we explored in a presentation I gave to Brigham Young University Provo students earlier this week. This podcast is a recording of the presentation.

The podcast is about an hour long, and I bookended the presentation with some thoughts before and after.

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WordPress Tip: Inserting a Gallery of Images into a Post

Tom Johnson — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 02:00:42 +0000

When you upload photos to a post in WordPress, the photos become associated with the post. If you insert the word gallery in brackets (as shown below), the post will show all the post’s photos in a thumbnail grid.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqvfTSuIbLA

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Showing Youtube Captions by Default in Another Language

Tom Johnson — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 05:17:27 +0000

I’ve been researching how to translate screencasts. Here’s one problem to overcome: Even if you use youtube’s caption system, if you embed the translated videos on a web page, will users have to select both their language and captions? Normally, we want the video to display these automatically if we’re embedding the video a page that we have translated.

It turns out that by adding some parameters from the Youtube Embedded Player Parameters Reference, you can set the language for the video as well as force-display the captions.

Here’s an example. (I just chose this video because it happens to be translated into about a dozen languages, not because of the content.)

Deutsch

French

Italian

English

Here’s how you enable captions to display by default in another language:

1. Go to youtube and find the video you want to embed. Make sure the video has captions translated into the language you want.

2. In the site footer, select the language you want youtube to display in. This will change all the site language to the one you select.

3. Click the embed button and grab the embed code. The embed code will contain a parameter specifying the site language you selected. For example, in the following embed code for the Italian video, it includes hl=it_IT. That means the language for the video is Italian. For the Deutsch video, it’s hl=de_DE.

Here’s that code in context. It’s on line 2.

4. To force the captions to display by default, add cc_load_policy=1 in the embed code, as shown in the code above on line 2.

That’s all you have to do. Now the video will display captions by default in the language you specified.

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Free video soft: video converter, ipod converter, mp4 converter

Tom Johnson — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 17:58:04 +0000

This may look like spam, but it’s not. If you’ve ever needed to download youtube videos or other media in an mp4 format rather than flv, this is the tool to use. Works great. (Think about those presentations you might be giving in places that are “offline”).

Free video soft: video converter, ipod converter, mp4 converter.

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YouTube – Society4TechComm's Channel

Tom Johnson — Wed, 13 May 2009 21:03:14 +0000

YouTube – Society4TechComm’s Channel.

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Embedding HD Quality Screencasts in Your Blog

Tom Johnson — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 02:10:57 +0000

If you’ve ever uploaded a screencast into a video sharing site, such as Youtube, you’ll notice that the screen quality is poor. Screencasts require a high degree of clarity to be watchable. For example, here’s a screencast I uploaded to Youtube. It’s hard to see what’s going on.

Other video sharing sites have the same problem. Here’s the same video on Viddler.

And here’s the same video on Vimeo.

Unlike the other video sharing sites, Vimeo also provides an HD version. At first I was excited about Vimeo, because the HD version is pretty clear in the compressed form. To see what I’m talking about, watch this same video on Vimeo’s site.

Pretty clear, right?

Now, here’s the catch. To embed the HD version of the video on your own site, you have to upgrade to Vimeo Plus for $59.95 a year. Then you only get 5,000 embedded plays, which means only 5,000 people can watch the HD video embedded onto your site, or one user can watch it 5,000 times. You can buy more embedded plays for more money. For example, you can buy 100,000 embedded plays for $199, which isn’t that much. But still, the costs start to add up. This is already about $260 — each year.

And of course if you’re embedding HD video, you’ll need an HD camcorder, which is another $600 (for a low-end version).

Even if you go to all this trouble, the HD embedded screencasts you post on your blog might not be so viewable at a width of 550 pixels, which is about my blog’s post width. The text will be miniature, and users will want to expand it anyway. To make it viewable at this width, you’ll probably end up relying on the pan and zoom features in Camtasia Studio. As soon as you start adding in the pan and zooms and other post-production processing, creating that simple screencast jumped from about a 5 minute operation to an hour. After a few screencasts, you’ll tell yourself you don’t have time for screencasting.

There’s a much better way to create screencasts: Jing and Screencast.com.

Here’s a sample screencast embedded with Jing.

In the compressed form, the text is hard to see, similar to the other video players. However, if you click the expand button (see image below), the player expands to show perfect pixel clarity, unlike the other video services. It also darkens the background, giving you more of a movie-viewing experience.

Brooks Andrus, one of the Jing developers, created a tutorial on how to embed Jing videos into WordPress blogs. You have to change a few parameters in the default screencast.com embed code to make it play in WordPress, but it only takes 10 seconds to change this. (It’s a bug they’re fixing.)

With both Jing Pro and Camtasia Studio, you can also capture HD quality screencasts. Just record a dimension of at least 1280 x 720 pixels. If you increase that size, maintain the same 4:3 aspect ratio. Choose the MPEG4 output (only available in Jing Pro). In both Jing Pro and Camtasia, the video output will be encoded with the H.264 codec. If you were to upload such a video to Vimeo, or embed it with the Jing wrapper as I explained above, the video would appear in HD quality.

You don’t have to use Screencast.com with Jing. Brooks also shows you how to FTP the video to your own site and embed the screencast with the Kimili flash embed plugin. This solution is useful if you want to maintain tighter control over your content.

I’ve been experimenting with Vimeo and other video-sharing services for the past couple of days. Overall, I’m pretty sold on the Jing/Screencast.com solution (or the Jing wrapper solution), for the reasons I explained in this post (cost, clarity, screen real estate). Jing and Screencast.com are also in their development infancy, so who knows, they may be working on more HD features similar to Vimeo right now anyway.

Do you agree with my analysis of screencasting solutions ? Are you embedding screencasts a different way? I’d like to hear your thoughts.