Amara is the relatively new name given to the service formerly known as Universal Subtitles. As I’ve written before, I’ve found this to be the most user-friendly online interface for adding captions to a web-hosted video (I even made a screencast, though some of the details are out of date).
One thing that kept me from declaring Amara the perfect online tool for captioning web-hosted videos is the somewhat involved (but admittedly still pretty easy) process of downloading the captions from the Amara server and then uploading them to, say, your YouTube account where your videos are hosted. Something as mechanical and repetitive as this ought to be automated in some way.
Well, guess what. Amara recently made a welcome announcement:
We are very proud to launch a major new Amara.org feature– free crowd subtitling for every personal YouTube user! Want to make your videos accessible to people around the world who speak a different language? Want deaf and hard of hearing users to be able to watch? Just connect your YouTube account to Amara and invite your viewers to help. Whenever subtitles get created, they will be synced directly to your YouTube channel. It takes about 10 seconds to connect your YouTube account.
In short, just create an account on Amara, link your YouTube account to your Amara account, and all of the videos in your YouTube channel will be automatically added to Amara for users to subtitle. Once subtitles for a video are finished, they will automatically be synced to your YouTube video.
I haven’t tried this out, yet, but once I do I’ll be sure to write up the experience.
How about you? What are your favorite methods for adding captions to videos? Please share in the comments.
