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What makes video so aggravating is that it is unsearchable. Capscribe has a great idea here. posted by Jason Ohler |
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Capscribe - Text & Video Mixing It Up Again
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What makes video so aggravating is that it is unsearchable. Someone points you to a great presentation about the solar system by a universally acclaimed world class presenter, but you are busy and only interested in the part about Uranus. How do you find it? Scroll, scroll, scoll... stop...play... is that it? Nope. Did I scroll past it? I hope not. Scroll, scroll, scroll...
Capscribe software allows you to add text below the video so that you can explain what is on the screen. I didn't see a text search function (which would be immensely helpful) but my guess is that either I wasn't looking in the right place or that a search feature is just around the corner. In the absence of a search function, scrolling through the text works pretty well. I was looking at Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, and wanted to find just the part in which he mentions his dream. Shortly thereafter I had it by scrolling through the text. Not as fast as a text search feature, but much faster than having to watch (and pay close attention to) the entire video. Sure, someone has to annotate the videos, but with billions of people on the web, my guess is someone will do it.
The applications are obvious. Besides searching video, Capscribe allows you to offer captions for foreign language students or the hearing impaired. It also allows you to add helpful explanations of what you are looking at, perhaps identifying the date, buildings in the background, etc.
I particularly like the idea of students being required to explain what is in a video, whether one they created or one they have been assigned to watch.
Watch the Martin Luther King speech with Capscribe captions.
(Image is a screen shot from the Capscribe website.)
Comments
I'm the author of CapScribe and completely agree with you about the need for search capabilities.
"Search" is one of the features that makes captioning incredibly useful for everyone, including people with hearing loss. If captioning were always provided (and if captioned video were always provided on the web), our relationship with the media we watch would become much smarter (not the word I'm looking for but close enough for now).
While you can search through captioned Quicktime videos that live on your desktop (the captions need to be placed Quicktime's text track - something that CapScribe can do), a web browser with the Quicktime plug-in does support search right out of the box.
In the coming months we will be adding our own search feature for web playback. We're planning to go beyond a basic text search model. For example, what happens to the quality of your search when you have access to the descriptive video track as well?
Thanks for taking the time to notice and comment on our work!
Charles Silverman Oct 21, 2009 reply to this comment