Hello and welcome to the Automatic Sync Technologies tutorial on captioning YouTube videos.

In August 2008, YouTube introduced native support for captioning - allowing you to upload a caption file along with your video file.  But you can only use YouTube's native captioning support if you own the particular video you want to caption.  If you do own the video, you should watch our tutorial called "Captioning your YouTube Videos".  So... what if you want to caption someone else's YouTube video?  Well, it is still possible to caption it, and that is the subject of this tutorial.

To caption YouTube videos that you do not own, we will use a supplementary service called Overstream.  You can find Overstream at www.overstream.net.  Essentially, Overstream allows you to associate a caption file with an existing YouTube video; it will then provide a new link to the captioned video which you can send out to your audience. It does not make a copy of the video, but rather just superimposes the captioning at playback time.

You can use AST's CaptionSync system to produce caption output for both YouTube's natively supported captioning and the Overstream service.  CaptionSync is a web-based captioning service that allows you to submit your video content electronically and receive back caption files for just about any sort of media including YouTube, Windows Media, QuickTime, Flash, DVD authoring, podcasting, and many others.  CaptionSync is much faster, easier, and less expensive than traditional captioning, and it is ideal for captioning web media.

So let's take a look at how to use Overstream to caption a YouTube video.  Overstream has a caption editor that will allow you to manually caption your video, but it can also import caption files generated by AST.  Let me show you how this is done.

First, find the YouTube video you wish to caption; YouTube will give you a link to the movie.  

Next, log into the AST website and submit the same video to CaptionSync.  You may need to rip a copy of the movie from YouTube in order to have a copy to submit to CaptionSync.  Click on the Advanced Settings button before you submit and make sure that you have selected the SRT caption output - this is what you will need for Overstream.  Then go ahead and submit your file to get your caption results.  When you get them back, save the SRT file on your disk.

Next, log into your Overstream account, then click on "Create Overstream".  Create a new overstream, and then enter the YouTube link to the movie.  Let's go get that over here.  Now, click the Tools link in the lower right hand corner of the Overstream window and select Import New Subtitles. Click the "Open SRT file" button and select the SRT file that you got back from CaptionSync.  Then click the "Import" button.  Your video is now captioned.  Click the Save button to complete your task and generate a link to your video.

Ok, let's take a look.  There's our video.

[ Overstream captioned video playing ]

Good!

On the screen, you sill see a link to the Overstream captioned video that I just demonstrated in this tutorial.  You can also find this video by going to www.overstream.net and searching for "CaptionSync".