YouTube's new caption feature, CaptionTube, now allows for adding captions via a sophisticated video caption editor, so users can add their text transcriptions side by side with the video in question.
Acknowledging the limitations prior to CaptionTube, the YouTube blog admits, "We recognize, however, that the process of adding closed captions to your video -- uploading a text file -- leaves a bit to be desired, even though we support a wide range of formats from various captioning service and software."
CaptionTube isn't exactly integrated with the YouTube video experience, as it's a separate application built by a Google UX designer. Setup does require a Google account, and occurs off YouTube's site, but once you allow access to your YouTube account, you can automatically pull in all of your videos, click to edit, and add captions.
The caption editor supports both timeline and list views, so you can add new captions while you're viewing existing captions in chronological order, video timeline, or preview format. When you're done adding each line of text and it's appropriate time stamp, you can then export the captions as a file. Unfortunately when all is said and done, you still have to manually export the captions, and then upload the file to your video's Captions and Subtitles pages.
We think this is a much better approach to creating and managing captions for YouTube videos, and we can only hope that YouTube will work to better integrate the experience and make it a more seamless process.
Additional YouTube Resources from Mashable
- 20+ Greasemonkey Scripts for Improving Your YouTube Experience