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Video captions, a feature that Google Video already had, has been added in the YouTube. They are actually comments of the video which are written in the text format.
Using the feature is simple, all you need to do is to go the ‘My Account’ link in the upper right corner of the YouTube page and click on the ‘My Videos’ link. Select a video in which the captions/subtitles are to be added. Go to the ‘Captions and Subtitles’ section which lies at the left bottom of the page and upload the caption/subtitle file and you are done. Easy, isn’t it?
On the usefulness of the feature, this is what YouTube has to say:
Captions and subtitles make videos accessible to a wider audience by allowing folks who can not otherwise understand the audio track to follow along, especially those who are hard-of-hearing or speak other languages. Captions are in the same language as the video’s audio track. Subtitles are in a different language.
Although you can add captions in any format but only SubViewer (*.SUB) and SubRip (*.SRT) formats will be shown properly as they are the only supported formats. You can also upload multiple captions and for that you have to upload each file separately. This seems a little hectic but lets hope we get to see some improvements in the near future. You can also add captions in 120 different supported languages and for every language you have to upload a separate file.
To activate the captions of a video, just click the ‘menu button’ which lies at the bottom right side of the video player.
In the snap below you can see the captions along with the ‘caption option’ at the bottom right corner of the player.
You can have a look at the video of one of the most popular car shows i.e. BBC’s ‘Top Gear’, which is shown as an example in the YouTube blog. The video contains captions in five different languages. Here is the link of the video.
veeery interesting, good video