Welcome to the official blog of the TV review team for WordPress.tv
We approve and publish all videos on WordPress.tv as well as help WordCamps with video post-production and captioning and subtitling of published videos.
We use this P2P2“P2” is the name of the theme the blogs of make.wordpress.org use. When asked to post or view something “on the p2” by a member of the WPTV team, that usually means you’re asked to check https://make.wordpress.org/tv. to post our progress, status reports, and occasional geeky video debates. Use the “Subscribe to Blog via Email” widgetWidgetA WordPress Widget is a small block that performs a specific function. You can add these widgets in sidebars also known as widget-ready areas on your web page. WordPress widgets were originally created to provide a simple and easy-to-use way of giving design and structure control of the WordPress theme to the user. to follow along!
Want to help us?
Video Editing — You can see what videos we have that need editing in this spreadsheet. No special credentials are needed, just download the raw video file, and use your favorite app to edit.
Subtitles/captions — You can help us extend the reach of of WordPress.tv by adding captions or subtitles to any published video. Just find your favorite video, and follow the steps here to create a caption/translation file and submit for review.
Weekly meetings
We use Slack for real-time communication. As contributors live all over the world, there are discussions happening at all hours of the day. We have weekly team meetings every Thursday at 17:00 UTC, and they are open to the public!
Rahul D Sarker (@rahuldsarker) (the names will be shown in random order on the form)
Thanks already to all 3 wanting to take the role!
The form is requesting Google credentials (to avoid people by accident voting twice). If you don’t have them, contact me directly to cast your vote and I’ll make sure it gets added.
All responses will be viewed only by Michael and myself (Pascal) and all data will be destroyed shortly after the announcement of the outcome.
Languages on WordPress.tv are currently managed as tags that are applied to videos. A review is needed on how to deal with languages for 2 reasons:
YouTube: The current language name/slugs are not compatible with YouTube.
Subtitles: The proposed language list for the subtitles is coming from VideoPress and are different from WordPress.tv and YouTube
Therefor I have a proposal below that I would like you all to comment on.
Current As-is situation
On the WordPress.tv back-end videos get a language tag. The tag has a Slug and a Name. Based on the slug you could see all videos in a certain language on the site e.g. https://wordpress.tv/language/germandeutsch/ or in the APIAPIAn API or Application Programming Interface is a software intermediary that allows programs to interact with each other and share data in limited, clearly defined ways. e.g. https://wordpress.tv/api/videos.json?language=germandeutsch
When uploading a subtitle on WordPress.tv, the list is taken from VideoPress. Check the full list by inspecting any video page :
YouTube has the most complete list, based on ISO639-1 two-letter codes, and also accepts locales like fr-ca:
Proposal
Languages are pretty stable and, ones set, hardly need a change. A tag as it is today would be sufficient, but it should include the unique codes of all different platforms. Languages should also be added ONLY if they exist on both VideoPress and youTube. If a locale does not exist (fr_BE), but the ‘main’ language (fr) exist, then that could be accepted of course. So the following tags could be created:
Name (English)
slug
wp
glotpress
videopress
YouTube
French
fr
fr_FR
fr
fr
fr
French (France)
fr-fr
fr_FR
fr
fr
fr-FR
French (Belgium)
fr-be
fr_BE
fr-be
fr
fr-BE
Spanish
es
es_ES
es
es
es
Spanish (Spain)
es-es
es_ES
es
es
es-ES
Spanish (Argentina)
es-ar
es_AR
es-ar
es
es-419
A dropdown with the above English names could be used on:
Keep 1 form for upload but add an indication if the video is finished or still needs editing
If finished, direct upload to YouTube
If not finished, upload to AWS (or WPTV), add links on how to edit videos and indicate timing issue
How to deal with a public form and upload to YouTube, can this be done?
YouTube accepts almost any file format of any size. After transcoding an mp4 file could be downloaded and stored on WPTV as archive
Our current WPTV should show the ‘local’ video in VideoPress only if there is no video on YouTube.
Most of the metadata still need to be stored on WPTV as YouTube cannot handle those.
Proposal is to have all videos starting 1-Jan-2018 on YouTube
Categories for e.g. languages, speakers, year should be reflected in YouTube
Items of attention:
Hashtags are public, what if some other videos, not WP related, also use e.g. #SEO?
How to deal with comments on WPTV and YouTube? Synchronisation from YT to WPTV? iframeiframeiFrame is an acronym for an inline frame. An iFrame is used inside a webpage to load another HTML document and render it. This HTML document may also contain JavaScript and/or CSS which is loaded at the time when iframe tag is parsed by the user’s browser.?
YouTube CC license is not ShareAlike
Suggested actions:
Start adapting the language codes on WPTV
Adapt WPTV videos to have a metaMetaMeta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress. tag with the YouTube unique ID
Talk to Google/WPTV team about the public form and upload
Talk to WPTV team about the YouTube CC license (CC and not CC-SA)
Next meeting in some weeks, date/time to be agreed on #wptv
Last year the discussion around YouTube and willingness to include YouTube into our current process for bringing videos to the WordPress World has increased, so the time has come to get some ideas together and find a way to embrace new ways of sharing and viewing videos, and collaborating on e.g. subtitles in different ways.
Let’s have a first zoom meeting so I can explain what is currently happening in YouTube, how videos get on https://youtube.com/wordpress at this moment (divided into playlists) and why we should not just ‘switch completely to YouTube’.
If you have ideas, have experience in other projects related to this or even just want to listen, please indicate your preference on this doodle so we can schedule our first YouTube brainstorming.
The link to zoom will be given on the slackSlackSlack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/.#wptv channel some time before the start.
Notice/disclaimer: I will record the meeting, but only for the purpose of my personal notes that I want to create at the end.
Please indicate your preference in doodle before Tue 11-Feb 09:00 AM Central European Time.
End of 2018, Michael (@roseapplemedia) and Pascal (@casiepa) were elected by all of you to be your Team Reps. As per common practice within the WordPress open sourceOpen SourceOpen Source denotes software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified. Open Source **must be** delivered via a licensing model, see GPL. project, team reps are being renewed after a period of time.
Michael is handing over his co-rep position, Pascal will continue for a while to hand over all the gathered knowledge to the newly elected Team RepTeam RepA Team Rep is a person who represents the Make WordPress team to the rest of the project, make sure issues are raised and addressed as needed, and coordinates cross-team efforts.(s), running a co-rep for WPTV.
The Team Rep role
Each community team has representatives who have been nominated by their peers to serve as “team rep”. The details of the role of a team rep can be found on https://make.wordpress.org/updates/team-reps/, but the most important items are:
Team Rep is a leadership role that is mostly administrative in nature; it is not a Lead role.
Team Reps will ensure regular online gatherings (chats) with all contributors
Team Reps provide updates
How it works
Deadline: 15-Feb-2020
Any active contributor on a team can be elected as team rep.
Self-nominations can be done using the comments in this thread. If you can dedicate some time a week and feel ‘fit’ to act as Team Rep, please post your comment before the deadline!
If you would like to nominate someone else, please do so also in a comment.
After this deadline a poll will be launched to collect all your votes. It will stay open until somewhere end of March.
Disclaimer: if you get nominated, please don’t feel like you have to say yes! We will add to the polls only the names of the people that are responding positively to a nomination. So feel free to reply with a “Thank you, but no thank you”
Hi all, as discussed on #wptvSlackSlackSlack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. channel I finished the first “betaBetaA pre-release of software that is given out to a large group of users to trial under real conditions. Beta versions have gone through alpha testing in-house and are generally fairly close in look, feel and function to the final product; however, design changes often occur as part of the process.” of the new video tutorial about editing the video before submitting them to WordPress TV.
In a weekly chat we talked about the need for a new tutorial to unify the process and to make the tutorial more consistent because now we have a written tutorial for Windows users (here: Shotcut tutorial) and a video tutorial for Mac users (here: iMovie tutorial) using two different applications, Shotcut for the former, iMovie for the latter.
We chose to use Shotcut because of its easiness of use (at least in doing what editing for WordPress TV requires), and because it matches some important requirements such as open sourceOpen SourceOpen Source denotes software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified. Open Source **must be** delivered via a licensing model, see GPL. code (link to GitHub repo), constant updates and cross platform binaries (it officially supports Windows, MacOS and Linux).
In this video I recorded the basic steps for cutting unwanted footage at the beginning and at the end, adding the intro/outro slides, adding the speaker’s slides when needed and exporting the final video.
I’ll attach to this post the video, the English script and the Italian script. The script are exactly the word I’ll say to explain the process in the audio of the video.
Please note that the video has no audio because I’ll record it when I have the final cut of the video with the improvements I’ll make with your help, so I recommend to watch the video keeping an eye on the script and please leave in the comment every improvement I can make to the video or if some steps are not clear.
Earlier this year I made my first contribution to WordPress and joined the subtitling team for Contributor DayContributor DayContributor Days are standalone days, frequently held before or after WordCamps but they can also happen at any time. They are events where people get together to work on various areas of https://make.wordpress.org/ There are many teams that people can participate in, each with a different focus. https://2017.us.wordcamp.org/contributor-day/https://make.wordpress.org/support/handbook/getting-started/getting-started-at-a-contributor-day/.. It was a great way to get involved and I enjoyed working friendly and focussed team, aiming to submit our captions for review by the end of the day.
As someone with fairly good typing skills, I thought it would be easy to subtitle a 12 minute video, thinking that I could do maybe two or three videos in the day. I was surprised that it took the entire day to do this. Other people had problems too:
Current challenges with the subtitling process
Now while Amara is a fantastic free resource, the following considerations need to be met:
The reading rate shouldn’t exceed 21 characters
You need to lengthen duration, reduce text or split the subtitle.
The “beginner” mode in plays 4 seconds, then pauses.
You have to do this while being aware of subtitle limits
After editing you have to line up the subtitle with the video in the timeline editor.
This process is generally straightforward but sometimes you need to go back and split the subtitle so it reads more naturally.
You have to be aware of typos and adding off camera indications such as laughter or a second person talking.
One of the good things about Amara is that it easily allows alternative language subtitles to be done too, multiple people to be working on subtitles of the same video, and the possibility to pick up an existing transcription if a contributor gets stuck.
Investigation into AI tools.
Subtitling is important for accessibilityAccessibilityAccessibility (commonly shortened to a11y) refers to the design of products, devices, services, or environments for people with disabilities. The concept of accessible design ensures both “direct access” (i.e. unassisted) and “indirect access” meaning compatibility with a person’s assistive technology (for example, computer screen readers). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessibility), but also for search, user experience, and learning. WordPress TV have a campaign running on subtitling- some subtitling work can be done by automation, but this still needs human involvement.
Videos hosted on YouTube already have access to an excellent auto-captioning library available in English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. While YouTube are constantly improving their speech recognition technology, automatic captions might misrepresent the spoken content due to mispronunciations, accents, dialects, or background noise.
Therefore, allowing YouTube to automate 80-90% of the captioning process could form a good starting point for the transcription as time stamps would have been created allowing the final ~10% to be reviewed and properly transcribed. The downside is that the automated versions would likely not be as intended creating all sorts of implications, and publishing responsibilities.
WordCampWordCampWordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. videos on YouTube are being uploaded from January 2018 and up.
Doing a quick search on GitHubGitHubGitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/ also reveals hundreds of open sourceOpen SourceOpen Source denotes software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified. Open Source **must be** delivered via a licensing model, see GPL. libraries for “Speech-to-text” implementations. Mozilla is actively developing a speech to text implementation called DeepSpeech
DeepSpeech is an open source Speech-To-Text engine, using a model trained by machine learning techniques based on Baidu’s Deep Speech research paper. Project DeepSpeech uses Google’s TensorFlow to make the implementation easier.
https://github.com/mozilla/DeepSpeech
I managed to install DeepSpeech locally with Docker and to my excitement was able to output some text via the terminal from a small English/American audio clip. The process is quite prone to error as you need to have all the required libraries installed but I will be investigating this further.
Ideally, DeepSpeech would be installed on some globally available server with an interface to upload audio files and download text. However, the bottleneck would still come from create and reviewing the ttml file.
While the video file can be downloaded from WordPress TV, isolating the audio file needs to be done manually.
Existing resources
The transcripts from WordCamps, speakers providing their notes, some of the text versions produced by STTR and tools also contribute to making subtitling easier. In addition, subtitles broaden the usage of videos and make them easier to translate / be used by people who can not access the recorded language.
Dublin did a lot of testing on this to produce materials which could help the community and this is being put together. The more that people subtitle and correct automated transcripts, the better the tools will become at learning different accents, words and dialects.
When a WordCampWordCampWordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. is over, organisers need a well deserved break. However a few tasks still remain: close the budget, follow up on invoices and … get the videos onto WordPress.tv!
One of our roles as WordPress TV moderator is make sure no valuable videos related to WordPress get lost, and so offering our help to get them online.
Can you help us with this reach out and inform organisers of what they can do (add the intro, upload to WordPress.tv or even just a bulk upload of the videos to our AWS S3)? Then let us know in a comment here and we’ll get together to get this process started.
Interested in how it would practically go? Have a check here.