Community Forums / Feature Requests / Closed Captioning

Thanks for the reply. Bundling the Text within the HD Video would be a solution, but when it is being resized for different resolutions, the text would either be incredibly small at YouTube resolutions or uncomfortably big at 1080p resolutions. Having a text solution wthin the actual service that overlays the video at the timecodes would be great since it doesn't mar the original video feed.

Thanks again for the quick reply. This is a great site as it has great HD support and a sharp player.

I also need captioning for my uploaded videos. I know it's not common for internet streaming videos, but if it looks like there's any possibility it would sure be nice. I also have a lot of family and friends who are deaf. I don't know how google video does it, but it definitely expands the accessibility of viewers to a crowd of people that love visual stimulation.

I've only been a member a few days, REALLY love the site and am totally addicted. CC is a revolutionary thing to provide support for, maybe there's a 3rd party downloadable program for adding CC that can be switched on and off within the vimeo player?

I need to add my voice in here. I use Google Video because of its CC feature, and more specifically the ability to add CC data in multiple languages. The nice thing is that there is a standard that can be followed so once you parse the file you should be able to put up any language needed.

There are two reasons I like this:
1 - Google is able to parse the CC data and search against it. If you offer this up for videos with CC data in it the hits for these videos would increase on Google. I see a radically huge increase in traffic for the videos with CC data... from only a couple thousand hits to tens of thousand hits for the same video with and without CC data.
2- I have a worldwide audience that speaks many different languages. By having a few translators I'm able to offer my videos to a much wider audience base.

I understand the need to dedicate engineering resources, but since so few file sharing sites have this option and it can be a deal breaker for some, I would encourage you to take a closer look at CC.

I'm hearing impaired and is developing yoga programs for people like me. Was thinking about inserting an
interpreter within my screen. A video within a video.

That's a feature I'd need too: I am italian, my actors speak italian, but we have friends all over the world who speak english, and I'd love to have "soft subs" function to let them enjoy our work at the best

Thanks Spacevidcast ..
I'll check them out.

I sigh the request for the Closed Captioning / subtitles with both my hands. Many people from all over the world would love Vimeo even more for being able to sub their non-english films. Is such feature that hard to implement?

I have a feeling youtube and google's recent addition of thought bubbles, captioning, and tagging with links was in development for a long time. But maybe I'm wrong. I think its a very cool function beyond the hearing impaired and translation functionality.

In the long run, I think live im-ing and captioning feeds will be a way that some people communally take in content. Not just the creator will have comment/captions to add, but people can subscribe or choose to see other peoples comments.

Meta layers of commentary. I think it will be a new reason to watch an "awful" show if you can subscribe to an amusing person's commentary, or watch with friends "live" or with your friend's commentaries/footprints turned on. Your friend can leave you jokes and comments specifically for you. Imagine a sad part of show coming on... and your friends comment pops up and says: Admit it John, you're crying like a little girl... so did I.

You'll see this emerging in the next couple years and part of the public space in 5 or 6 years. Comments function in this way on youtube, but you can't properly get rid of the chatter that you don't want ie the Hatred and spammers.

Privately Public commentary is the wave of the future.

It's also part of the future of advertising... everything on screen should have a link.. and or a for sale link, whenever you press pause. Some people may choose to have the links always be present ( for certain products they are looking to buy ie shoes) even when its live because they choose to see what is being sold on any given show. Sex and the City would have been great for this model. Privately Public commentary and feeds also has the facebook related business model. Friends and connections that buy or recommend trends can move product and generate revenue.

Imagine shows generating a true average revenue per view by selling real product and only subsidized by ad revenue, rather than being a primarily eyeball/ad revenue system with minor amounts of paid for product placement and branding that exists today.

I am a web designer who works with many organizations serving the deaf and hard of hearing population. If you were to add captioning functionality similar to Google Video, I wouldn't hesitate to highly recommend your service to those organizations. The combination of HD video capability (for crisp sign language) and captioning would make Vimeo the definitive go-to place for those organizations -- instead of Google Video.

sorry to be an ass, but youtube does it.

hi,

when I see this thread and this here vimeo.com/forums/topic:6636
I think there is a demand for subtiles/closed captioning

;)

Hey.
This is a basic accessibility requirement. Veoh could really rock the world if they offered this. It is gold for hearing impaired folks.

Compliance with Rule 508 in video is something I deal with daily.

First, there is no such thing as closed captioning on the web. It does not exist. What does exist is open captioning and timed text display.

While some video formats support captioning and timed text display, not all video does. I've used it or some work that I've presented with Windows Media Player.

For Vimeo's part, the engineering is not that big a deal. It's likely the software they use could already support the timed captioned files they need. As anyone knows who's done this work, the REAL task is getting the transcript done and timed. This would be an impossible task for the staff of Vimeo, but if the user community wanted to submit the timed files, the rest of the process could likely be automated.

Blake, what do you think? Would you guys be willing to give this a whirl if the software you had could do this seamlessly with a few mods to the encoding program? I don't remember what you guys are running on the back end to do your encoding, but I'd be willing to do some legwork on it.

It might help me at work as well, so I'm willing to give it a try.

Here is a website that I've used to assist with captioning for flash using customized skins. Vimeo simply needs to look at how Adobe does it and/or this company. By the way, this is one of the cheapest ways to get your video captioning. It is not as accurate as a premium service but it's not bad:

captionsync.com/

click on resources

By the way, I need this badly. Most of my work needs to be 508 compliant. Trying using your video editing titling program to produce open captioning...render...render...render...type...listen...type... it is a nightmare from a production stand point.

Here's one more vote for adding captioning/subtitling support to Vimeo's Flash player.

Keeping the text as data, rather than rendering it on the frames, would allow Vimeo to index the captions as part of search. Result: more relevant searches.

And another support for closed captioning on Vimeo, please! I do a lot of work in local government and we are bound by accessibility guidance that means I have to supply closed captions / subtitles wherever possible.

That means Google Video for now. I could use YouTube, but we have had a bad experience of inappropriate 'related' videos being shown next to a video for a schools project.

I really like Vimeo and would love to see support for CC. I'm happy to beta test!!

I'm hearing impaired so I'm hoping this feature will be added as soon as possible. It's really important for accessibility. Incidently, you can stop YouTube coming up with related videos when you embed them. Just add "&rel=0" after the video ID number in the embed code. It's a pain though, as you have to do it for each one.

Hi all. Please put me down as another vote for a proper closed captioning feature.

Around one in seven people have some kind of hearing loss. The number of people trying to watch your videos in a difficult environment (too noisy or too quiet) must be at least the same again. And that's before you go into the massive issue of translation subtitling, which opens videos up for billions of people.

If you're not detecting a demand, it's probably because the massive number of people who need a closed captioning feature just don't come to Vimeo, they go to Google or YouTube where they can get closed captioning. Which is a terrible shame, cos you kick both those sites' asses in every other conceivable way.

I'm starting up an internet captioning/subtitling company, and I'd really like to be able to recommend that my clients host their videos with you. At the moment I can't, and that seems a shame.

If you need any help testing or developing, or any advice on what formats of caption file to support etc., give me a yell.

+1

Our research lab (The Open Publishing Lab), is located at the Rochester Institute of Technology. RIT shares a campus with the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, so our audience includes both hearing and deaf individuals.

It's a catch-22. We of course want to make our videos available to deaf and hard of hearing students. But we do not want to edit text overlays directly into the video, as not all viewers will want them. For now, we include transcripts with some of our videos. This is less than ideal for either party.

We are very happy with Vimeo's service, but are disappointed that Vimeo does not have any closed captioning support - especially considering that YouTube already does.

See the thing that Staff might be missing here... Is not everyone wants to see CC, so the ability to turn it off should be available.

For example when I watch movies I turn on Subtitles just to know exactly what I may have missed. The thing is if someone else is watching they are 9 times out of 10 asking me to turn it off (I guess it can be distracting).

So yes we can add manually, but what if some of our viewers don't want to see it, there should be an option to turn off or on.

We would love to add captions too for 508 compliance, but understand the complications behind developing it. Thanks, Vimeo!

This is another cry out for captioning/subtitle support. Uploading whole separate versions of a video when you're potentially getting it translated into half a dozen or more languages is a hell of a slog! And we really want all the versions on the same page, anyway, for sundry good reasons. Not to mention the advantages relating to search, etc., of having transcriptions visible along with videos.

I see that CS3 has captioning support, might this be helpful at all?
digital-web.com/articles/captions_flash_video/

Not sure from this thread if you have already developed closed captioning - but - we are coming from Google Video (which just stopped accepting new videos). Thanks to closed captioning our videos are viewed over 1,500 times a day. Google indexes those captions and they become a way for people to find our videos. Would LOVE to see this feature on Vimeo for our church videos.

Oh, there's a W3C XML standard for captioning called DFXP. XML is easy to import into Flash. There are also free tools to create DFXP captions. You can crowdsource captioning: just provide an upload interface to add DFXP to videos, so anybody can caption any video. Then add a rating or "report spam" feature to ensure the quality of the captions. That's not rocketscience, and your competitors have something similar already.

We'd be interested in multi-language subtitles on the videos, we currently author DVDs with about 6-8 subtitle versions in European and East Asian languages.

multilanguage subtitles would be the only major missing feature, in my opinion (REPLACING VIDEO rules). My films go to 10 different countries, including the Far East, and they are spoken in 5 or 6 different languages... we have the (wo)manpower to translate them, all we need is the platform. do that, and i will be Vimeo PLU$$$ customer.

Stopping by to let you Vimeo folks know that we haven't forgotten. :)

Also to let you know that blip.tv, iTunes, YouTube and GoogleVids all now have a closed captioning feature. As Namics says, adding the ability to use .SRT files, .SUB files or DFXP (Timed Text XML) files is simple in the grand scheme of things. Hell, there are users here who could help you with it. And in the meantime you are losing ground to vastly inferior competitors, which bugs seven shades of hell out of me cos I'm a Vimeo fan.

Allowing yourselves to be beaten on this issue is frankly silly, because on every other criterion you're absolutely the best video hosting site in the world. But for millions of users (yes, that's right, MILLIONS - about 35 million deaf/hard of hearing in the US, 9 million in the UK, for a start) you are simply not an option on account of lack of closed captions. I remain bewildered by your position on this.

Come on, Vimeo. Catch up with the rest of the world.

Yes, please bring captioning to Vimeo! YouTube's captioning feature works great, you can just turn them on if you need them, but if you don't need them, you don't have to have them overlayed on the video (potentially lessing the experience for hearing people). Just support adding in an SRT or SUB file. Easy enough.

CC would be great to have on Vimeo, I am new here and the first I was looking for was CC. I make Permanent subs to my videos because the content I make is not English. CC would help to make subs in English, Swedish and Finnish for those who can't hear anything.

Bump. I love what you've done with Vimeo, but lagging behind on CC is a big fail. It's totally not hard.

I work at a university where we strive to make every video accessible with CC. We have recently discovered Vimeo as an excellent solution for some of our longer videos. Please, please consider adding this functionality to Vimeo. Making content accessible is NOT a frivolous feature!

here is another support for CC

I think that the demand for closed captioning exists as it would benefit everyone in terms of accessibility and search engine optimization. I have been a huge fan of Vimeo, but it looks like I will have to transition to YouTube as the majority of my videos need to be Section 508 compliant due to accessibility requirements at my university. It really is the right thing to do...it would benefit Vimeo...I am surprised at the resistance to closed captioning from Vimeo.

Yeah, we are in the same boat here. Our audience, although small, keeps asking for captions. I will also have to move back to YouTube it seems :(

There is a way to create open captions on a mac if you have MovCaptioner and QT Pro. MovCaptioner will help you to create an embedded text track in your movie. After it imports the text track you must re-export (note - don't just do a save as, but export) to a new movie and the captions will be combined with the video track. A trial version of MovCaptioner can be downloaded at synchrimedia.com

I recently joined Vimeo Plus and just assumed that closed captioning would be available. My clients require closed captioning and I would like to use Vimeo to do this.
Vimeo's request for notice of increased demand is a little disingenuous. The fact that YouTube are doing this should be sufficient indication that this service is needed.

I echo the request - ability to display our CC is critical for the videos we produce.

Vimeo is a website acessed from all over the world, and it's purpose itself is supposably coherent with an worldwide proportion trade of information and knowledge. The CC feature needs to be offered. It does not make any sense for us to have to upload 3 times the same video with different subtitles.

I obviously strongly support the request.

The lack of closed captioning support is the reason we are not using Vimeo at the moment. I'm rather disappointed that Vimeo values accessibility so lightly, especially considering the limited effort required to implement TimedText captions.
I have ca. 30 videos with TimedText XML captions. We now host these ourselves with JW Player, which is a less than ideal solution. This is high quality video we want to offer to a broad audience.
YouTube isn't really an option because their video player, ironically, isn't accessible to blind people.

Frankly, I find it kind of cynical to point to 'lack of demand' for not supporting this. You want more deaf people? Do you consciously ignore the international audience? This feature is fairly easy to implement and is of huge benefit to international audiences, search indexing and, of course, the hearing impaired.
Basically, you're turning away the possibility of adding a time-coded, (almost) word for word transcript to a large portion of videos on Vimeo.

I'm not particularly bothered about the terminology used but very much support the ability to be able to add at least one language if not many against a video.

Not only is this needed for multilanguage support but for deaf and hard of hearing. It's also a vicious circle, if subs are not supported, those people will not frequent the site. Very often a site like this will be useless to these potential viewers.

Without this capability, there's a vast audience being cut off.

I'm a co-developer of 22frames.com ( 22frames.com/suggest.aspx ). The grand goal of the service is to index every (public) captioned/subtitled video on the Internet. We are all aware that captioned/subtitled videos are scattered across the Internet on multiple video hosts – generally mixed with the billions of other videos. More here: ( 22frames.com/aboutus.aspx ).

While we have not yet looked at specific approaches to automatically collect captioned/subtitled videos from Vimeo (we are in very early beta and there are many hosts), we are accepting submitted links from multiple video hosts. This includes Vimeo. We are therefore inviting anyone that wants to share videos to explicitly submit them here: ( 22frames.com/suggest.aspx ). Who knows, it may even increase Vimeo's interest in this area.

Has there been any updates on this? I work at CSU Pomona and we have to be 508 compliant. We just started producing more videos and have plans to increase this further. Vimeo is vastly superior to other video hosting sites, yet I will be forced to use something like YouTube because they have some semblance of a CC service.

I also think it's strange that there hasn't been a staff response about this topic for 2 years. Is there some work being done on this or not?

Google just announced that they are providing auto-captioning for YouTube videos... Vimeo is getting even further behind in this area.

ericstoller.com/blog/2009/11/28/google-adds-auto-captioning-to-youtube/

Staff responses here show they haven’t investigated the technical aspects. No user can simply upload a captioned or subtitled video (those are two separate things, and you can have both at once) and just expect it to work.

Tell me, Vimeo staff: What exact formats do you support? Where in the player do I turn captioning and/or subtitling on and off? (Is that keyboard-accessible, or do I have to be completely undisabled apart from a hearing impairment in order to use it?)

Various commenters’ claims that captioning is straightforward and really no trouble whatsoever are false.

I worked as a closed captioning editor for 2 years.

While translating dialogue and sound into words can be complicated, embedding that text in video content is not.

That process was standardized by the FCC in 1976.

(Search Google or Wikipedia for "Line 21" if you want more technical info.)

ALL major video encoding formats--Flash, Quicktime, WMV, AVI, OGG, etc.--support closed captions.

Vimeo took their stand two years ago (via Blake Whitman):

"Until the demand for a feature like this increases, we probably won't have the time to develop it."

And Soxiam's post two weeks ago makes it clear that is still their position today.

If you want closed captions, make more deaf people.

Joe -

Thanks for pointing out that the is a difference between closed captions and subtitles. It is important.

To build on your point:

Closed captions are for the hearing impaired. They attempt to textually communicate dialogue and audio:

NEO: AM I THE ONE?

[TRINITY YAWNS]

Subtitles are for viewers that hear fine but don't understand the language spoken in the film. In subtitles, there is no need to identify Neo as the speaker or point out that Trinity is still audibly bored because the viewer can hear that it is Neo speaking and Trinity yawning. The subtitles for the same dialogue would look something like this (if they were in English):

- Am I the one?

Though Vimeo behaves equally indifferently towards viewers who don't speak English and those that are hearing impaired, they are not the same people.

I would like to see captions available on Vimeo like they are on YouTube. It would be a great feature.