Closed captioning a YouTube video

Describes how to add closed captioning to your YouTube videos with just a text editor. The method simply involves playing back the video using QuickTime, capturing the time-codes and pasting into a text editor.

The text editor I used on the Mac was Eddie: http://www.el34.com/
A suitable text editor for Windows would be Crimson Editor: http://www.crimsoneditor.com/

Both allow you to do find-and-replace with Regular Expressions, which is needed to trim the leading "0:" from the timecode.

Category:

Howto & Style

Tags:

• closed
• captions
• subtitles

[Jainh872]

Screenflow (on a Mac).

[Jainh872]

What operating system are you using? What text editor? What is the error message when you upload?

[Jainh872]

Yeah I wasn't sure about the day bit (just guessing, huh?).

As for TextEdit, it doesn't do regular expressions, so it would be harder to replace the numbers if they were only at the start of the line, but you might get away with replace "0:00:" by "00:" (as long as 0:00: didn't occur elsewhere in the line, which it might).

[Jainh872]

If there is no closed captioning file, then the CC button won't be there. So it needs to be captioned in at least one language. They have a translate feature, so once it is captioned in (say) English, you can try to translate to other languages automatically.

[sensoriussupremus]

Is there a way to make part of the text in Italic, for example if you have 2 people taking in a video, to make it clear who's speaking??? Thanks :)

[Jainh872]

I'm not sure. I tried putting i and b in angled brackets (like HTML) but YouTube seemed to ignore that.

[BenOuarYVillon]

Merci Eddie, tu es un sacré pote ! (real fellow)

[leonavictoria]

Thanks - great presentation; can you please tell me which program you used to record your screen with?

[RCSpain]

Here is a detailed example of a YouTube Closed Captioning file: wwwXdsuccXorg/?p=2795

You will have to replace the X with a period in order to get the URL to work.

[NBAssociation]

i really would like to know how put a minimized video caption on your video screen

[MeAgainstTheRadio]

my balls itch can u scratch them?

[twattyplaps]

i just can't seem to save the text editor file as srt! if i add that file at end then try to upload it just does not work

[MsPerditadurango]

nice voice

[Doug4347]

could you please show us how to do this on window 7, just asking, would be quite useful