Miro Subs Alpha a project of the participatory culture foundation

We recently released an update to Universal Subtitles that fixes lots of little bugs and adds more polish and functionality to the website. If you’d like to try it out, I suggest subtitling a video (get started now). We’re full steam ahead on development and plan to do a release every few weeks. Technically we’re still in alpha right now, but the tools are already very useful in the real world, as you can see below!

We’re excited to see people and organizations beginning to use Universal Subtitles in their everyday workflow! Mozilla Drumbeat (a big early supporter of ours) is using the subtitle widget (the little tab) to encourage people to get involved and subtitle/translate their videos. Within 24 hours, the video was subtitled into the original language (Spanish) as well as English, which is great real-world progress. I’ll embed that below; it’s fun to see how the subtitles can easily move from site to site with a video.

Example of Mozilla Drumbeat using Universal Subtitles. This is an html5 ogg video, so you’ll need a browser that supports this format.

Another organization that’s trying out Universal Subtitles is WITNESS, who specializes in human rights video. You can see their recent blog post that includes a Universal Subtitles enabled video. Similarly to Mozilla’s experience, in less than 24 hours, a contributor translated the video into Polish (check out the comments—Bryan even got a chance to thank them!). Super inspiring stuff and we’re clearly just at the beginning. I’ll be updating this blog more often with examples of videos that could use some help with subtitles and translations.

This latest release adds more video compatibility, so we now support Theora, WebM, YouTube, and blip.tv. We’ll be adding more support for things like Vimeo, mp4, mp3, and flv in the very near future. We fixed a number of minor annoyances and gave the website a big boost. A great example is the new revision history, which creates snapshots of subtitle modifications so everyone can see a revision history and compare different versions of subtitles; it works a lot like Wikipedia’s article history.

In the coming months, we’ll be making it far easier to enable, embed, and spread subtitles for videos and there will be lots of website improvements as well. We’re also working on new features: a better interface and tools for translators, a slicker “subtitle me” tab for embeded videos, automatic machine translation for both translators and viewers, additional video formats, and TONS more!

Make sure you’re on our email list for updates (use the sidebar to sign up).

Universal Subtitles now supports videos on Blip.TV in addition Youtube and HTML5.  But it’s a bit of a hack: we’re using the vidscraper library to get the direct link to the flash video file, and loading that in FlowPlayer.

This has a bunch of disadvantages.  By removing the hosting site’s player from the equation, we’re messing up their advertising models, their sharing tools, and their whole plan for user interaction.  Yuck.  The blip folks are awesome and don’t mind, but it’s clearly not ideal.

But to make Universal Subtitles work with peoples’ own video players (the way we do with Youtube) there are a few things we need that many video players still don’t provide (for example, the player needs to give our widget the current playback position from the video, and let us skip to any point in the video).  The Youtube API makes this easy, so it was easy to support Youtube “the right way”.  And the ideal of course is for sites to make videos available in browser-playable formats like Theora or WebM.  Most other large video sites, however, aren’t doing this yet.

Until they do, the benefits of accessibility alone clearly outweigh the disadvantages of pulling the video URL into our own player.   For the millions of viewers with auditory disabilities, captions are a necessity.  We don’t think any video service will object to people switching video players in order to view (or contribute) captions.

And if sites want full compatibility with Universal Subtitles, there is a simple way for them to make that happen: check out supporting other video players in the github wiki.  It outlines the API we need, and where things stand for supporting some popular sites.

Once your site’s video player meets these criteria, we can support your site.

And of course, since all our code is free and open source, the fastest (and best!) way to make us support your site is to submit a patch!

We are very excited to be organizing the first ever Open Subtitles Design Summit, hosted in NYC on September 29 & 30 and sponsored by The Open Society Institute.

The summit marks an incredible opportunity for a diverse group of stakeholders in the caption/subtitle orbit to come together and make real steps towards increasing availability and user friendliness of captions and subtitles. The meeting will be high-level, yet technically anchored and goal-oriented.

Summit Goals

• Connect major stakeholders from projects, organizations, and movements that have open subtitling needs or focus.
• Identify ways to solve stakeholder subtitling needs and be aware of existing technology that can be leveraged. Find logical places for collaboration/cooperation.
• Move towards standardizing solutions and pushing forward the state of the art in open subtitling.

Participants will include: video creators and producers, engineers from major video hosting services and technology companies, end-users, standards engineers, accessibility advocates, open source developers, educational leaders, and other individuals and organizations with a stake in the subtitling world.

Due to extremely limited space, the event will be capped at around forty participants. If you or your organization are interested in participating, please contact us and we can see if there’s space available.

We’d like to thank the Open Society Institute for sponsoring the event and Open Plans for providing an amazing venue.

Note: We are seeking an experienced ASL interpreter to volunteer for this event. We would be happy to offer references and provide free lunch for both event days in return.

Universal Subtitles is an open source project for making a better and more accessible internet for everybody. Today we’re launching a development center to make the process open to anyone interested in getting involved.

If you’re interested in contributing, we’d love to have your help. The subtitling widget (see the demo) is written in javascript using the Google Closure Library and the community website (launch TBA) is done in Django, the Python web framework.

We have put up a bunch of helpful information, including: how to download/set up a dev environment, how to join our development mailing list, and where to find the bug tracker. If you’re looking for a place to jump in, we’ve put together a list of features, bugs, and other things that would be a huge help to the project (look for the “Bite Sized Bugs” section).

There’s some good low-hanging fruit, so I’d really like to encourage anyone who has javascript, python, or Django experience to check out the dev center!

Today we’re releasing an alpha demo of our subtitling tool.  Please, try the demo and give us feedback.

You can’t use it to subtitle your own videos yet.  But we’ve put up a demo page where you can try out our new approach to subtitling on a sample video. Your feedback will be really helpful, so please do try it and let us know what you think.

Once you login your changes will be saved, but they will only be visible to you. We did it this way so that many people can test the same video without stumbling over each others’ changes.

Soon we’ll be launching an alpha community site that will let you submit your own videos (Youtube or HTML5 for now) and embed them–with the widget–in your own webpage. So the useful stuff is still yet to come.  In the meantime, we’ve made the front page of universalsubtitles.org partially live, with links to the demo, a screencast, and an overview of our vision for the project.

There are still many known bugs, and obvious features we haven’t added yet. We’re also planning some major changes to the widget interface. But feedback will be super helpful. So please, try it out.

If you’d like to support our work on Universal Subtitles, Mozilla Drumbeat will double your donation. If you’re excited about this project, make a donation now!

Finally, here are a few links if you’re a developer or advanced tester.  We’ll be launching our developer page soon.

• List of known bugs
• Repository on Github
• Dev mailing list (please only join if you’re a developer)

And follow us on Facebook or Twitter!

We’ve had our heads down for the past month and are very close to releasing an alpha version of Universal Subtitles. The alpha will give everyone access to a preview version of the subtitling widget and the Universal Subtitles website; we’re aiming to release around June 15th.

We’ll have many more details here as soon as we go live and would like to thank you for your patience and enthusiasm. Also, we’d like to make an extra special thanks to everyone who has donated through Mozilla Drumbeat! Your contributions have made the alpha version possible.

Do you know of an organization that needs to get video subtitled? We’re getting ready to roll out a testing site soon, which means people will be subtitling stuff. We’d love to focus some of this effort towards a good cause.

If you know of an organization (or work for one) that could use subtitles, captions, or translations please let us know. We’re especially interested in folks doing educational, non-profit, or socially focused work—they will need to have videos ready to go (i.e. publicly accessible on the internet).

Email us if you have a suggestion, esp. if you can make an intro: universalsubtitles@pculture.org

This year we were fortunate to be able to participate in the Mozilla Labs Design Challenge, a “series of events to encourage innovation and exerimentation in user interface design for the Web”.

The Collaborative Subtitling Design Challenge was an opportunity to get our early prototypes in front of designers and usability experts who could propose alternate paths, focusing on the question “How can users quickly create a timed transcript of any video on the web?” and responding to data from a round of usability testing based on an earlier prototype of our subtitling tool.

We had several great submissions. Here they are, along with thoughts on how to incorporate their ideas into the project. Thanks to everyone who sent in submissions, and thanks to the folks at Mozilla Labs for making this happen!

The Design Challenge Submissions

1) Collaborative Subtitling Design Challenge Submission from Joanna Pierozek

This submission lists the positives and negatives of the prototype, and makes changes to address some of the negatives. Many of these are addressed in our current iteration of the widget (no more disappearing controls, a back button, better instructions, and the addition of clickable buttons). A few key points we haven’t addressed yet, and will:

1. ENTER to split lines (or backspace to join)
2. Instructions to users to transcribe sounds (and in-picture text)
3. There’s still no “undo”.

We’re following up with Joanna to get her input on changes we’ve already made and planned changes.

2) “Thanks for Text” from Xanthe Matychak and Jeremiah Parry-Hill @RIT

Here the submission zeroes in on a simple but crucial question: how do you make people feel so good about submitting subtitles that they’re itching to do it again? The video (above) presents a really compelling answer, something we’ll definitely consider and also something that makes me very optimistic about the broad success of our project– watching this video I can really picture large communities of people mutually motivating each other to caption the web.

This idea doesn’t exist in yet in the code, but we are definitely thinking along these lines and look forward to involving these folks from RIT in our process.

3) Submission from Alecsandru Grigoriu

Alecsandru reimagined the subtitling interface including Google Wave and chat with other collaborators among the features.

Some of these ideas are things we’d think of as 2.0 features, but the ability to chat with collaborators in particular is an excellent idea.

One thing we particularly liked in his mockups was this initial menu bar (pictured above). We probably wouldn’t give quite as much emphasis to upload, but presenting the user with some very clear choices here is great.

4) “SubberSault” submission from Faber-Ludens

This submission from Faber Ludens in Brazil designed a complete interface on a significantly different path. It looks good and it’s very intuitive, though I think the advantage of our division of transcribe / sync steps is that with a little practice, a user can type at full speed, and finish the transcribing work in about the same amount of time it would take to just type the text. Typing is by far the most time consuming part of the whole effort, so optimizing for typing efficiency (by separating this work from the work of syncing a video) seems important to us.

The main thing I get out of this mockup that I’d like to draw from is the big clear “Ok, next sub” button. I can see users preferring large buttons to key controls, especially in the syncing step.

To sum up…

These were all excellent submissions and we’re really happy with the results. Thanks again to everyone who sent stuff in, and thanks to Pascal and Pejman and everyone at Mozilla for working with us to make this happen.

We were flattered when we found this video on YouTube. It’s by a young woman named Caro, who is very enthusiastic about our project and goals. It’s really motivating to see someone get excited by something you’re working on.

Interestingly, one design challenge participant suggested using video as a medium for people (who want subtitles, captions, or translations) to both request help and thank others for their help. Caro has convinced us this is a wise suggestion.

Public media, in the sense of PBS and NPR, in the United States, and many public broadcasters in other parts of the world, usually have missions that are a perfect fit with the goals of captioning, subtitling, and translation.  In addition, they often have very supportive audiences that would enjoy helping to make their content more accessible.

Are you part of a public media show or organization that would be interested in adding captioning, subtitling, and/or translation to videos that you are posting online?  Are there specific needs or obstacles for your organization?  We’d love to hear from you and see if we can help– email me at nicholas@pculture.org.