YouTube Engineering and Developers Blog: webvtt

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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.