YouTube has updated its video captioning capability that was launched nearly two years ago. Outlined online, the changes include new language support including Japanese, Korean, and English for both automatic captions and transcript synchronization. Speech recognition for these languages is also supported, while video owners can add captions and subtitles in 155 different languages and dialects.
Before renting a movie or show through the premium YouTube interface, users can see which subtitles are available. Searching for a particular quote in a YouTube video is also possible thanks to a new closed caption filter.
Viewers can also change how captions looks and broadcast file formats better match what users would see on their TV, with italicized captions indicating the speaker is off-camera, text appearing near the on-screen speaker, and scrolling in a real-time mode. Broadcasters and filmmakers can also now upload existing caption files thanks to newly added support for SCC, CAP, and EBU-STL subtitles. MPEG-2 video files with CEA-608 encoding for closed captions will also be imported.
YouTube has been working on closed captions for nearly six years.
