Commons:Timed Text

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English: TimedText is a custom Wikimedia Commons namespace to hold closed captioning text, or subtitles, to be associated with other media, such as audio or video files. This page intends to explain the feature's concept and use.
Shortcuts
COM:TT
COM:SUBS
COM:SRT

Using[edit]

Also see Commons:Video#Subtitles and closed captioning.

Timed Text can be used for any media that is presented in a time sequence:

  • Audio file
  • Silent video
  • Spoken video
  • Animation demonstrating a concept or how something works

Actual examples

Finding[edit]

Commons needs a means to find Timed Text files for specific languages; the following suffer from the Search function's limitations (such as: it does not show all matches; it includes non-matches; it needs regular expression support).

Search including some Timed Text .srt files in different languages:

English • German • French • Portuguese • Russian • Swedish • Ukrainian • Polish

Other methods to help user find Timed Text:

  • {{closed cap}} displays links to all the closed captioning files available for a file, can be placed on a media page and its talk page.
  • {{special|Prefixindex/TimedText:{{PAGENAME}}.|stripprefix|1|subtitles}} yields a link to all related timed text files (example).
  • Commons:Timed Text/search by lang displays search links for all Timed Text files for a given language, useful for Commons pages, Categories and Talk pages.

Finding videos that need subtitles[edit]

The category Videos needing subtitles groups together all videos on commons for which users or authors have requested transcripts.

Finding videos that need subtitles translation[edit]

One way to find such videos, is to open one of the subcategories of Category:Files with closed captioning depending on the preferred starting language, and then to use Help:FastCCI (on the top right of the page) to include only the videos that don't have subtitles for your preferred target language.

Example[edit]
  • To find videos with subtitles in English to translate them, go to Category:Files with closed captioning in English.
  • Then, click on the FastCCI arrow to open the sub-menu and select "In this category but not in..."
  • In the textbox, enter the corresponding category depending of your preferred target language:
    • For German, enter Files with closed captioning in German‎‎‎
    • For French, enter Files with closed captioning in French‎
    • For Russian‎, enter Files with closed captioning in Russian‎

etc..

Timed Text talk[edit]

The TimedText talk namespace is for discussing the respective Timed Text pages, but it could also be used to link and categorize the Timed Text page.

Maintenance tasks[edit]

Creating[edit]

Location of the [CC]-button

By clicking the [CC] button in the toolbar of the wikimedia html5 media player, you can select subtitles if they are available, or open the Subtitles editor to create subtitles for the video.

Create Subtitles from DVD[edit]

To copy existing subtitles from an DVD you can use software such as SubRip

Create Subtitles with YouTube[edit]

YouTube allows users with an account to create subtitles out of any sound file. Keep in mind the speech recognition is still in beta phase and produces unexpected results sometimes. It is preferable to upload a transcript of the audio file to the YouTube video. This will reveal a much better result.

Steps to create the subtitles (a video tutorial of the steps can be found here):

  1. Upload the audio file. (The multimedia file must also include a video track but you are free to choose a blank one or any other)
  2. In the Edit-Tab of the uploaded video go to "Captions"
  3. Click on "Add caption"
  4. Copy and paste the transcript
  5. Wait some time and the captions are integrated into the video
  6. Download the .SRT file
  7. Copy and paste the contents of the .SRT file into the corresponding page of the video on Wikimedia Commons

Create Subtitles using Amara[edit]

Amara is a website that allows the creation of SRTs.

Convert YouTube Subtitles to Timed Text format[edit]

This section describes how to convert XML YouTube subtitles to SubRip (srt) format, that is TimedText subtitles format used in Wikimedia Commons.

If

  • the YouTube video has subtitles in some language (e.g. I created this YouTube video with subtitles in English, in Russian and in Livvi-Karelian languages),
  • this video was uploaded to Wikimedia Commons (e.g. this file),
  • you want to copy YouTube subtitles to the same video at Commons.

Then:

  1. Download the subtitle in XML, put the ID of the YouTube video at the end of the url: http://video.google.com/timedtext?hl=en&lang=en&v=__youtube_video_ID__
  2. Install Ruby.
  3. Download a Ruby program to convert video subtitles from YouTube's XML format to the SubRip format.
  4. Run this program and convert XML file to .SRT file.
  5. Copy and paste the contents of the .SRT file into the corresponding page of the video on Wikimedia Commons.

General Tips[edit]

Keep in mind to paraphrase not spoken sounds and encompass them with rounded brackets. E.g. 

 1
 00:00:20,000 --> 00:00:24,400
 (engine sound)

Internationalization[edit]

After the subtitles have been transcribed in the original language of the video onto a timed text file, they can be translated into other languages as follows:

  • Open the timed text file in the original language, say English for example TimedText_talk:Elephants_Dream.ogg.en.srt, in edit mode and copy the whole of the page.
  • In the address bar replace "en" with the language code of your choice, say "fr", then paste the original text in the new page.
  • View the original video, then translate the text into your language.
  • After saving the new page, the video with the subtitles should load onto the page; you can view it to check the timing of the subtitles.
  • Add a category link to the talk page [[Category:Timed Text in Language Name|Language Name]]. For example, see TimedText_talk:Elephants_Dream.ogg.fr.srt.

Wikipedia articles about the topics of timed text or subtitles[edit]

These are articles about either Q844253: Timed text, or Q204028: subtitle.

Linking[edit]

This section needs expansion.

How to associate closed captions with multimedia files?

A possible categorization scheme is: 

Category:File formats + Category:Media types
                      |
              Category:Timed Text + Category:Legend in German
                                  | 
                          Category:Timed Text in German

                                  + Category:Legend in French
                                  | 
                          Category:Timed Text in French

                                  + Category:Legend in English
                                  | 
                          Category:Timed Text in English

Related categories: Category:Files with closed captioning

See also[edit]

Retrieved from "https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Commons:Timed_Text&oldid=306776149"