Applies To: Everyone, especially if you have ever wanted to know how to turn Subtitles on on a YouTube video…
Hello!
You probably didn’t see it (not many people did) but we tried doing a TV advert a few years ago! One of the things we did was to upload it to YouTube, and this is where I learnt something new…
In fact I learnt two new things! The second one is probably the most useful in every day life, but I thought the first one might be of interest…

Thing 1 (Auto-generated Subtitles on YouTube)

When you upload a video to YouTube it automatically adds subtitles, it does this by listening to the video and trying to understand the words being said.

Our advert had a fairly easy to understand voice over and the Auto-generated subtitles were fairly good, there were a couple of (fairly important) errors.

See if you can spot my favourite errors before I fixed them.

Before: “Are you struggling to get to grips with your i paddle or Android tablet”
After: “Are you struggling to get to grips with your iPad or Android tablet?”

Before: “Call Oh one 229 777 60 six or visit…”
After: “Call 01229 777606 or visit…”

As you can see, it’s always worth checking anything auto-generated.

Thing 2 (Moving Subtitles on the video)

I asked Julie in the office to check my changes, and that they lined up with the words as they were being spoken. After a couple of tweaks we were happy, apart from…

Julie: “Mike, can we move the subtitles so they don’t cover the phone number on the video?”

Mike: “I don’t know, let me check”

Mike: “Yes, but it’s complicated”  (conversation as I remember it 😉 )

And this is where I stopped because I was mega busy with stuff! But then I decided to do a little more research and this is the bit I learnt…

..YOU can move the subtitles yourself! 

When you watch a YouTube video with subtitles on you can click and drag the subtitles around on the screen! Give it a try on this, totally picked at random, video.

Turning Subtitles (or Captions as YouTube call it) on

When watching a YouTube video which has captions available you can turn them on by clicking this button. Then click the same button to turn them off again.

You can move them by clicking and dragging the subtitle text around.

Advanced Subtitle Settings

Click the Cog icon, then Subtitles, then options.

Picture of Cog

Then you get all sorts of fun options such as changing the colour to say yellow!

And now you have yellow subtitles, moved up out of the way of other text on the screen!

And there you are! Master of Subtitles!
Mike 🙂
P.S It’s worth noting that not all our videos on YouTube will have subtitles and those which do we may not have corrected any auto-generated errors. If you spot any which are wrong / funny let us know!
P.P.S This is an old advert, so the website address on the video doesn’t work any more.  If you’re interested in the books and would like to see an infopack, please email us at [email protected] and we’ll get one sent out to you.
UPDATE: YouTube announces they have auto-captioned One billion captioned videos, read more here.