Thanks, Jean-Fred and SJ,

I agree with you both that subtitles are an important service for us to provide, as we ramp up our video collections.

Earlier this year, I had a great conversation with Nicholas Reville, founder of Participatory Culture, the organization that runs Amara. They would be happy to work with us to provide subtitles on our sites, and are open to doing what it takes to make it happen.

That said, our multimedia team is switching its focus two two large projects (Upload Wizard and Structured Data), which means we’ll have to postpone work on video until these projects are further along. Also keep in mind that we still have a lot of basic video work that needs to take place (e.g.: TimedMediaHandler upgrade, Kaltura player 2.0 integration, transcoding for unsupported formats, error messages for unsupported formats) before we can start devoting our scarce resources to add-on services like subtitles.

So it’s good that this service is on everyone’s radar, but as far as our team is concerned, we’ll have to pick up this work at a later date, sadly.

Fabrice

On Apr 16, 2014, at 3:13 PM, Samuel Klein meta.sj@gmail.com wrote:

+1 great question.

There are a lot of video archives we have access to that it would be great to work around with / convert into microtask challenges. For instance, the collection of Khan Acad. videos from 2008 before they changed their licensing to a non-commons-compatible one.

One good reason to ingest them into Commons rather than leaving them in other open-access archives online is that we could subtitle and then translate the subtitles (and then generate voiceovers in different languages) -- something few archives do.

S

S

On Wed, Apr 16, 2014 at 5:54 PM, Jean-Frédéric jeanfrederic.wiki@gmail.com wrote:

...

Hi,

I understand this is not on the multimedia team priorities, but I wanted to put under the radar the subtitle support on Wikimedia projects

I just created [[bug:64031]] to keep track of this: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=subtitle

The two main features really impairing the subtitle workflow right now (in my opinion at least) are:

• Integration with Translate extension.

Bug discussion seems to indicate not much needs to be done but the path forward is unclear https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42790

• Amara / UniversalSubtitles integration

Amara / Universal Subtitles is an awesome tool to easily add subtitles to videos. As part of the 2011 (?) multimedia Beta, we used to have it integrated on Wikimedia Commons, but not anymore (not sure when that was discontinued). Where did it go? What would it take to have it back? https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=62699

I hope this is in scope of this list :)

Thanks,

-- Jean-Frédéric

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