CaptionTube is one of YouTube’s TestTube projects and was brought to my attention by Brad Hinson via @russeltarr on Twitter. You may have guessed that it’s primary goal is to help users easily create captions for anyone who may benefit from a text stream that mirrors any spoken content in a video. Obviously this is necessary for anyone who is hearing impaired, so kudos to Google for trying to help us all out with accessibility.
What I like about CaptionTube is that they allow you to not only caption your own videos, but also any other video on YouTube that has dialog or narration. This could be helpful in our situation where Disability Resources could help out with the captioning of an instructor’s video for any student that needed this resource. This is provided that the instructor already has videos on the site or is open to uploading them there.
CaptionTube has opportunities for further development by tightening integration with existing YouTube technologies. Few would find the existing (beta) auto-captioning integrated with YouTube ready for prime time but it does have one redeeming factor, captions can be downloaded, edited, and re-uploaded back into a new captions track. This means you can use the basic tool as imperfect as it is, to give you a starting point. I find it easier to work in that way rather than starting completely from scratch. I hope that in future versions of CaptionTube, the software engineers can give us the ability to import captions generated from another source including style of captions that YouTube creates.
I agree with your final request for importing captions. Just used CaptionTube for the first time, working on a nearly 18-minute long film of student interviews. Fourteen minutes in, I realized that something inappropriate could be overheard. Long story short, I can re-edit the film to deal with it but I can’t import my captions to use the 14 minutes’ worth that I already transcribed. Darn!
Sorry to hear about your frustrations. I do hope they remedy this in the future. One other service you may want to experiment with is Universal Subtitles (soon to be called Amara). I haven’t tried it out, but there are a few things that look promising about it; the fact that it can be used with any video service (Vimeo, Viddler, etc.) and that the captioning can be crowdsourced.
Thanks. I’ll check it out.