RE: two line captions: Often it’s the case where there are brief interchanges between speakers and you want something like:

Jim: Hi.
Bill: Howdy, Jim.

And you don’t want it broken over two pop-ons because readability is negatively affected.

Also, when you have relatively long spoken instances, it is a plus for usability/readability if you can control line breaks, so that each line is semantically complete within a single pop-on/chunk–your not splitting infinitives, ending lines with prepositions, etc.

I experimented and YouTube is not supporting either hard returns or [br] (or any variant) within the SubViewer file to produce a manual break.

However, if you use SubRip instead, hard line breaks are accepted. I urge you to consider going with SubRip over Subviewer–the syntax is very close and it shouldn’t be a big change in terms of your backend.

If you try this, in Subviewer:

00:00:02.23
Jim: Hi.
Bill: Howdy, Jim.

YouTube sticks it all on one line. But with SubRip:

3
00:00:02,23 –> 00:00:04,34
Jim: Hi.
Bill: Howdy, Jim.

YouTube will accept and properly render out the break. For the end user, the effect is preferable.

Cheers,
k

And for the specifics:
1. I agree. This will be an option soon.

2. Two line captions? Why not just split it into 2 sequential captions? YouTube will automagically break long captions into multiple lines. Maybe I am missing the intention…

I did not know about ‘accessify’, but it looks like a good alternative to magpie. However, I think we can still do better My goal is to make captioning so easy that people won’t have an excuse.

However, it would also be nice to be able to pause play while editing the grid. I will add “universal access keys” to the list. Thanks!

Some more suggestions:

1. You should be grabbing end times rather than start times. If I hit enter to place the caption I am actually at the *end* of the phrase I’ve just heard. Maybe write the start time when the user hit the space-bar/play, to start playback again. Right now, you have to go back through and adjust all of the times.

2. Make the caption line two rows–a Ctrl + Enter goes to the second row, an Enter does as now, places the captions. And allow the editable boxes to accommodate two rows. YouTube should accommodate two lines. (The subviewer spec. allows for [br] to be on a line as a break and I believe if you go with SubRip you can just break the line.)

3. The “loop” suggestion is definitely needed for this app to be truly practical. My recommendation would be to have it loop back to the previous end time and play forward from there. Ctrl + Space seems like a good key combo: Space for resuming play, Ctrl + Space for loop, Ctrl + Enter to add second caption line for a chunk, Enter commits the chunk.

If you haven’t seen it already, the folks at accessify have this, which works much like Magpie: http://accessify.com/tools-and-wizards/accessibility-tools/easy-youtube-caption-creator/. Your service has the advantage of allowing the person to have a single place to get record the transcript and caption simultaneously. But the accessify thing is quite useful.

Best,
k

However, it would also be nice to be able to pause play while editing the grid. I will add “universal access keys” to the list. Thanks!

Looking good otherwise!

-Melany-