dotSUB

dotsub.jpg

Friday 18 january, Michael Smolens, Founder and CEO of DotSub gave the fastest pitch ever during the Video Vortex event in Amsterdam.
dotSUB is an online tool which facilitates easy transcription and translating of subtitles. I uploaded a short clip to have a go at it. Feel free to log in and play with it, this is a test to see how the tool works, it serves no other purposes.

“dotSUB is a browser based tool enabling subtitling of videos on the web into and from any language. There is nothing to buy and nothing to download. Recognizing the potential of global communication powered by the Internet, the founders of dotSUB created a web-based tool that enables video to be accessed in an open, collaborative, “wiki” type environment. The dotSUB tool gives anyone the ability to translate video content into multiple languages via subtitles rendered over the bottom of the video.

The idea of dotSUB was born in early 2004 after viewing the film “Fahrenheit 911.” Michael Smolens, Founder and CEO of dotSUB, realized that if one documentary film in English might have an impact on a very close US Presidential election, what would happen if all independent and documentary films, television programming and video from all cultures could be made available in all languages – what a powerful impact on the world that would be!

The goal was to create a tool that was as simple to use as the Google search bar, with no downloads, that could engage the power, methodologies and thinking of open source, wikipedia, social networking, creative commons and web2.0 user involvement to substantially remove language and cost as a barrier to cross-cultural communication using video.”

It works very easy, after uploading you can make your transcription,

transcribe.png

when finished you save this, this will become the reference for the translations which can be made by you, or anybody else anytime later.
subtitle.png

dotSUB is also a subtitle generator:
The completed subtitles can be downloaded as .srt files.
subtitle2.png

it probably does not come as a surprise to you that embedding is dead simple. Playback requires flash, i haven’t tested if it works with Gnash.
The written subtitles, even when they are not complete become available through the controls of the player.


Posted on: Sunday, January 20, 2008 by: in category: Annotation tools, Editing software, Pre-production