Aloha!

Did you know that YouTube auto-generates Closed Captions for your videos? It's really amazing to me how quickly and accurately they are able to do this.

I'd recently gotten interested in adding Closed Captions to my videos for WA. I'm a former special education teacher and I understand that many folks (not only those with hearing impairments) can benefit greatly from having the text to read along with the audio. And, you know, sometimes I prefer to watch a video with the sound off and just follow along in the captions.

Unfortunately, the video player here at WA doesn't support Closed Captions at this time.

But I've found a hack (my apologies to those with true hacking skills).

In this video I'll show you how to use YouTube's voice recognition technology, and another free piece of software, to add captions and burn them in, so they're a permanent part of the video.

Once you get the subtitle file from YouTube, you'll need some software to hardcode (or "burn") the captions into the video. There are several options, including the free and very versatile VLC (VideoLAN), which I love and use all the time.

But for this purpose, I've found the easiest to use is another free program called Handbrake. It's available for Mac and Windows (and maybe other platforms as well)

Here's their site.
https://handbrake.fr

Please let me know what you think in the comments and let me know if you have any questions. And if you learned something please click the green "Like This" button below.

Joe

Note: I realized after I published this video that I skipped over an important step.

• If you make changes to the auto-generated subtitles, be sure to click publish edits to be sure you've saved your changes.