Internal:Library Lab/Captioning

About
The International Amateur Scanning League, as part of the FedFlix project, has digitized several thousand videos from the collections of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). These videos are available on the Internet Archive (and YouTube). WikiProject FedFlix on English Wikipedia is working to transfer relevant videos to Wikimedia Commons, so that they are available for use on Wikipedia. Wikimedia Commons has some experimental features to support new video technology, including Universal Subtitles integration that allows people to caption video. Once videos are captioned, that makes them more accessible, and also opens the possibility for subtitles to be translated to other languages (e.g. Spanish, German...)


 * We need volunteers to help out with captioning videos.
 * If the DCPL has any video that would be useful, we can see about digitizing those as well. For use on Wikimedia Commons, they need to be public domain or be put under Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) or Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC-BY-SA) licenses. (Not sure if arrangements could be made to grant permission for non-PD or non-CC video, to put them on YouTube or elsewhere?)
 * We could talk with Michael Dale, the Universal Subtitles, and OpenVideo folks and see what technology / hacking / development needs there are to push these features beyond experiment and develop any other tools or features that would be helpful.

Videos

 * Featured videos - Wikimedia Commons
 * Videos from NARA - Wikimedia Commons
 * FedFlix - on the Internet Archive

Paid services

 * http://cpcweb.com/ - $95 for 30 seconds; 2 hours for $1,420;
 * http://vitac.com/ - $7.50 / minute, $75 minimum;
 * http://videotranscription.net $3/minute "done by humans";
 * http://speakertext.com $2/minute (machine/human analysis)

Do-it-yourself tools

 * overstream.net
 * yt-subs.appspot.com
 * subtitle-horse.com
 * captiontube.appspot.com
 * wikicaptions.org
 * universalsubtitles.org

Formats

 * subviewer (.sub)
 * subrip (.srt)
 * youtube has own format (.sbv), in addition to the above