I have been asked numerous times as to the best way to caption YouTube videos hence this blog post. When I initially started to caption videos, I used the ever popular MAGpie software but found that captioning YouTube videos proved to be extremely tedious with MAGpie. Fortunately, there are a number of free tools available on the web that makes the captioning process a whole lot easier. Below is a review of the tool that I use CaptionTube:

CaptionTube

It has taken a while but Google have finally come up with their own tool for adding YouTube captions. Unfortunately it does not integrate with YouTube as fluidly as we may want it to but neverthless works efficiently as a caption editor once you get past the learning curve. It allows you to connect directly to your YouTube account and have access to your videos within CaptionTube. Once the captions are created though, you will need to export the file and then upload the file to your YouTube account, this is where the fluidity is lost. Add a functionality to automatically add the caption to the YouTube video and I think we are on to a winner app. CaptionTube is what I used to caption the LSBU YouTube videos

Screenshot of captiontube

Other tools that I have found useful include:

• Subtitle Horse
• dotSub
• Easy YouTube caption creator

Screenshot of the LSBU YouTube Channel

Things have been quiet on my blog over the past few weeks as I have been extremely busy at work and one of the projects the web team here have been working on is the launch of the YouTube channel for London South Bank University (LSBU).

What makes our University channel different from every other University channel out there you ask? Simple, our channel is “probably the first” University YouTube channel to ensure every video uploaded also has captioning incorporated that makes use of YouTube’s captioning system, you can turn the captioning on or off and even use the inbuilt google translate engine to view the captions in a language of your choice. Matt Cutts goes into detail about the YouTube Translation functionality in his blog.

Let me know what you think of the channel. It has around 10 videos up at the moment and I will be hoping to build on these over the next few months. The University is slowly but surely making it’s debut into the social media realm and the web team here intend to make the best use of Web 2.0 . Only a month ago I created the LSBU Twitter page and without any publicity we have already managed to pull in nearly 200 followers. In the grand scheme of things, these may just be baby steps but the web team here have a lot planned to ensure that the University embraces the latest social media technologies.