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YouTube enhances captions with new features, languages, formatting choices

YouTube is bringing new capabilities to its popular captioning feature, according to today’s blog post by the search engine giant. The company added Japanese, Korean, and English language to auto-captioning and transcript synchronization features. Captions and subtitles are now supported in 155 different languages. Movies and Shows information finally show available subtitle languages, and users can now search for memorable quotes in closed captions.

This is accomplished by adding “, cc” to any search or clicking Filter > CC after searching to only see results with closed captions. The CC icon in the bottom-right of the video player now lets you change the font size or colors for captions. YouTube now supports broadcast captions for precise positioning and styling (check out this demo) in various industry formats, such as .SCC, .CAP, EBU-STL and closed captions created for TV or DVDs or those in MPEG-2 files with CEA-608 encoding…

YouTube has had captions since 2006 and users have uploaded more than 1.6 million videos with captions to date. In an effort to enhance millions of videos without captions, Google recently enabled automatic captions for 135 million clips, more than tripling the number of captioned videos available since July 2011. It is interesting that the Federal Communications Commission recently published rules governing closed captioning requirements for web clips.

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