Captioning Your Videos
For every video managed in Bits on the Run, one or more captioning files can be uploaded and published. These can be used to offer closed captions for the hearing impaired or foreign-language subtitles for non-native speakers.
Example
Here's an example video, containing English captions and subtitles in Japanese, Russian and Farsi:
It is not possible to author captions inside Bits on the Run, but various third-party tools are available for that. For example, the easy-to-use Subtitle Horse website is great for creating the occasional captions. A desktop tool like Subtitle Workshop is better for users who frequently caption videos or want more extensive control.
Uploading
Captions can be uploaded in the dashboard, from the Captions tab of the video details. For each captions file, a position and a label can be selected:
Captions should be in one of the following two formats:
- SRT: a plain text format, introduced by the SubRip software tool (example).
- DFXP: a subset of the fairly extensive W3C W3C TTML text format (example).
More info on these formats can be found in our Captions plugin references. Since we use this plugin to publish the captions, the same features and limitations apply to BOTR.
Note a handy shortcut to Subtitle Horse exists below the captions list. It links to the editor with your video already pre-loaded. Simply create your captions, export them as SRT and then upload them into Bits on the Run.
Playback
By default, each video player will display captions of a video. These captions are rendered as white text with a thin black outline. In the dashboard, you can set the captions to render on a solid black background instead (more readable in small players), or you can set the captions to not display at all:
Players will store in a cookie which language your visitors have selected. This way, a visitor preferring e.g. German subtitles only has to make that selection once. Each subsequent video he watches will preselect the German subtitles automatically.