ResearchBuzz

Good news for folks with hearing impairments and folks who don’t have hearing impairments but sometimes just can’t figure out what other people are saying (that would be me.) YouTube announced last week that YouTube videos (at least those in English which have voices clearly speaking and aren’t drowned out or muffled by background noises, music, etc.)

Apparently there are twenty hours of video being uploaded to YouTube every minute (which personally I find mindbending) so as you might imagine it’ll take a while for everything to be autocaptioned. I did some random searches (for things like lecture, speech, items that seemed like they would be better suited for autocaption) and didn’t come across much. I did find a lecture on the Theory of Relativity that had been captioned, so you can see what it looks like. Captions are at the bottom and a CC icon shows up in the tool bar at the bottom of the video.

You can click that icon to turn the captions on and off, but you can also change settings as well — you can change the size of the captions and also use an auto-translate feature to have the captions appear in another language. It’s machine translation, of course, so it won’t be perfect.

Speaking of that, the transcriptions are machine transcriptions as well — so you know they won’t be perfect either. Owners of posted
videos can download auto-generated captions, correct them, and upload new versions. If your videos have not been captioned yet, you can also request that they get the captioning treatment — a “Request Processing (English Only)” button lets you put your video in the queue, while YouTube assures you “We will try our best to get some results in a few days.”

This announcement is great but I suspect we’re not going to really see the full impact of this until months down the road, when the mighty YouTube transcribing golems have had time to do their work and captions become a lot more common. I’m looking forward to the transcriptions becoming available in other languages, so I can use the translate feature.

This has apparently been around for a while, but I just recently learned about it. SubZin, at http://www.subzin.com/, lets you search for quotes in movies and TV series. Keen!

You can do a simple phrase search or you can use the advanced search that lets you specify title, genre, etc. I stuck with the regular search and looked for “size of a buick”.

I got four results — three movies and one TV episode –, starting with 1977’s Annie Hall (“There’s a spider in your bathroom the size of a Buick”), and continuing with movies from 2002 and 2006 and a TV show from 2006. Each search result has a thumbnail of the movie cover when available (with a link to the movie/episodes on the Internet Movie DataBase) as well as the exact time of the quote and the full quote. Icons allow you to e-mail the quote to a friend, show it on social networks, or see the quote in context with other dialogue.

I’m sure you could use this site for reference but I had some fun chasing down cultural references. Did you ever see Jaws? “We’re gonna need a bigger boat.” I found that same phrase in eight other movies, starting in 1994 with Clerks. According to Subzin’s blog, there are over fifteen million phrases here from over 15,000 movies, so if you get started with one phrase you’ll find plenty to explore.

Ahhhhh. I think 2010 is going to be a great year for cheap online entertainment. A new entry in the races to keep up with all the media available online is Movie Monitor, at http://moviemonitor.com/. This site tracks tens of thousands of movies that are available to watch online, either for free or for pay.

The front page dives right in with thumbnails of posters for recently-added movies, acclaimed movies, and the most recently-added movies. Hold your mouse over the to find how much it costs to buy or rent these movies. You can also browse lists of new movies, free movies, etc.

Movies are provided in lists of 20, with details about the actors and director and sometimes a plot summary. To the right of the summary information is a list of providers, with how much it costs to buy/rent the movie at each location. I was impressed at the number of providers the site covers, including NetFlix, Hulu, Vudu, Fancast, Blockbuster, and Amazon.

Of course, there are a lot of movies to go through (the “Free” browsable list boasts 475 titles) so there are many ways you can narrow that down a bit. You can specify different genres (comedy, action, kids) and which providers you want to include on the list. You can also choose to sort the list by how old the movie is, by title, or when it was added to the list.

Looking for comedies only from all providers, and choosing to list by the oldest movies first, I found 73 listings. They started with a 1941 Barbara Stanwyck / Gary Cooper movie (Ball of Fire) and continued with movies from a variety of folks including Richard Pryor, Johnny Depp, Robin Williams, and Peter Sellers.

You’re going to see more and more of these kind of sites, helping you sift through and figure out what kinds of media are available online. I like the way this one is organized, with quick ways to narrow down search results. Looks useful. It’ll be even MORE useful when the RSS feed feature is developed…