YouTube Engineering and Developers Blog: accessibility

Engineering and Developers Blog

What's happening with engineering and developers at YouTube

YouTube @ Google I/O: All About Captioning

Friday, June 3, 2011

Google I/O 2011 may be over, but we’re continuing our series of blog posts recapping the great developer material covered at the event. We previously covered our talk on the iframe Player API, and the next presentation we’re highlighting is “The YouTube Caption API, Speech Recognition, and WebVTT captions for HTML5”.

The session features Jeff Posnick from the YouTube Developer Relations team, Naomi Black from the Accessibility Engineering team, and Cynthia Boedihardjo, a Live Stream Program Manager. As the session’s title suggests, a number of different topics were covered, with video accessibility and captions the common theme throughout.

The material covering the YouTube Captions API, including a sample application that demonstrates using the API from Python, will be of particular interest to the YouTube API developer community. The talk also includes some early WebKit demos of WebVTT implementations for the <track> element in HTML5 as well as more information and stats about the Live Caption gadget launched at Google I/O. The gadget provides captions alongside streaming video.

The full video of the session is embedded below, and the slides from the talk are available as well.

Cheers,
—Jeff Posnick, YouTube API Team

Google

Labels: accessibility , captions , googleio , io2011 , webvtt

YouTube Captions Uploader Web App

Thursday, January 27, 2011

Captions can greatly enhance the experience of viewing a YouTube video, and the YouTube API has offered developers ways to upload and retrieve caption data in authorized requests for a while now. However, the various YouTube API client libraries don’t natively support interacting with captions at this time, and writing your own code for uploading or retrieving captions can be challenging.

With that in mind, we're happy to announce the YouTube Captions Uploader open source project on Google Code, which provides real-world code for uploading captions to YouTube. The code is written for the Java App Engine environment, and it uses some nifty new App Engine features like the Channel API, the Blobstore Service, and Task Queues. And even if you're not an App Engine developer, we hope that the code that interacts with the YouTube API's captions service will provide a good starting point for writing your own code.

In addition to open sourcing the code for this project, we’re also running the code itself on a public App Engine instance, http://yt-captions-uploader.appspot.com/. So, even if you're not a developer, you can still use the application to upload captions for videos in your YouTube account.

Please share your comments or feedback via the project’s issue tracker. We hope that you find it useful both as a standalone web application and as a starting point for writing your own code!

Cheers,
—Jeff Posnick, YouTube API Team