YouTube subtitles and you After seeing the Brainwashers video, I now have subtitles religion. Today I uploaded a fully subtitled version of Marc Headley's speech in Hamburg, and I'm going back through the other Hamburg speeches to put subtitles on them. Here are the reasons why YouTube subtitles are great and you should use them: - They're more readable than Movie Maker captions because the letters are shown on a darkened background. - The user can resize them by clicking the video area and pressing + or - - They don't screw up the original video. They can be turned off to show what's underneath them. - If you make a mistake, you can fix it without replacing the video. - They're much easier to edit than Movie Maker subtitles are. - They're reusable. If you have the subtitles for a video that you're editing, you can adjust the timing and use them in your edit. - If someone translates your caption file line-by-line into another language, you can add it as another subtitle track on the same video. - If not, YouTube will use Google Translate. - At some future date, YouTube will undoubtedly make subtitles searchable. YouTube's software recommendations are here. So far I haven't found a program that I like. They all either don't support Unicode, or have an essentially text-based user interface that requires you to type in timestamps. Fortunately YouTube accepts the SubRip format (.srt), which can be edited in Notepad just as easily. A SubRip file looks like this: Code: 1 00:02:06,200 --> 00:02:18,870 During my 15 years of working at the Scientology headquarters I witnessed and was exposed to many things that I'll never, ever be able to erase from my mind. 2 00:02:18,870 --> 00:02:29,330 Just to give you some examples: For the entire 15 years that I worked there, I averaged at least 100 hours a week, work hours. The first line of each record is a sequence number, the second line is the start and end time for displaying the caption, and the remaining lines are the caption text. If a line of text is too long to fit in the caption area, the player will break it up. When editing captions this way, I load the original video in Movie Maker, find out where each sentence starts, and type that into Notepad. Later this week I expect to have subtitle files for the Hamburg speeches by Graham, Larry and Marc, as uploaded by AboutScientology.
