YouTube Improves Captions With New Formats, Languages, And More

Captions on YouTube videos can’t be all that exciting. It’s been around since 2006. But apparently caption functionality has been widely extended, according to a blog post by YouTube.

The video sharing platform that takes up half the work day for most of us has introduced new languages to YouTube’s caption feature. Automatic captions and transcript synchronization are now available for Japanese, Korean and English, and there are over 155 supported languages for manual captions and subtitles. YouTube rentals will also start telling you what subtitles are available to you before you rent.

Channel owners will also now have support for their chosen format when it comes to broadcast video captions. In other words, text will be seen in its original position and style, and can be placed near the speaker, italicized to indicate off-camera voice over, or even set to scroll if the captions were generated in real-time model.

Of course, we’re looking for videos on YouTube more often than we’re posting them (in most cases). That said, YouTube has added a new search option for closed captions. Simply add “, cc” to any search or click Filter > CC.

And while finding what you’re looking for is great, customizing what you’re looking at can be even better. YouTube has added caption settings to let you change the font size and colors used. Just click on the “CC” icon and then the “Settings” menu. It should be self-explanatory from there.

Last, but certainly not least, YouTube has added support for new caption formats used by broadcasters including .SCC, .CAP, EBU-STL, and more. Any closed captions created for TV or DVDs will be converted by Youtube.