At the Ubuntu Screencast Team we have made a few screencasts in English.
We've been approached by people whose first language is not English with a view to translating these videos. With little thought I suggested that someone send me a .srt caption/subtitle file and/or an audio file for their native language.
The .srt file we can deal with fine. People can either download it and put it in the same folder as the video "et voila" they get subtitles in their video player of choice (tested here in Totem). The flash player we use on the site also supports .srt files, as does Google Video (allegedly). So that's all well and good.
The potential problem is the audio files. We currently host each video in numerous formats (OGG and FLV, and for some, AVI), and each one in at least 3 resolutions. That makes between 6 and 9 video files which can range from 100 to 200 MB in size (in total) depending on their length, resolution and encoding.
I could just dub the (in this case) French audio over the top of the English on my master MPEG2 video and then re-encode the 6-9 different versions. This would be a little time consuming (in terms of CPU grunt to do the encoding) but it's not that big a deal, I can walk away and leave it running.
There is also the time taken to upload all that new video to the site, again time consuming but also something I can walk away from. My upstream bandwidth is 700Kb/s so I get around 80KB/s upload.
Then there is the additional disk space to hold all of this.
I guess I could upload the master video to my own personal virtual host (in a data centre in London), and install the necessary tools (ffmpeg etc) on there to do the encoding server-side, then it would be very quick to get the resultant files from my virtual server to the Canonical hosting where the screencast site is held.
Is there another way to manage this?
Of course I could choose to make less formats/resolutions available in the non-English language - perhaps make them _only_ available in Ogg format. But this seems a bit rude to me to people for whom English is not their first language.
Suggestions welcome.
Hi, Is there any way to
Hi,
Is there any way to convert the sri file to something like a avi or wmv? Any help is good. Thanks.
Sorry my english not very good.
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So what happens next?
I see this thread and Som other comments at the Ubuntu Screencast site, but cannot see anything being implemented... is there a mailist or something to follow this on?
I wopuld be interested on translating the screencasts eventual text to Spanish.
R.
See these pages:-
http://screencasts.ubuntu.com/Subtitle_Usage
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ScreencastTeam/TranslationStatus
Great pages
Great pages, on these pages, I find my needs, Thanks.
Also it would be cool if you
Also it would be cool if you will provide torrents as well ;) RSS+bittorrent is convinient a lot.
Thank you for your screencasts. Good job!
Some ideas
Ok, so I had a few ideas. Multiple audio tracks, as explained above would be great. However only if combined with multiple subs too.
Though I'm not fully sure how it would work in tthis case, gstreamer can do some excellent muxing, and you could set up a system, where people picked a res/language and were presented with a stream to watch/download.
Also I read, with great interest, about the language of Ubuntu. I wonder how feasible it is to come up with a kind of macro recorder, so it could be, played back and record the actual screen in different languages.
Just ideas........
Matroska
the Matroska format handles multiple video, audio and subtitle "tracks" in different languages; with some effort, one can even share parts of the tracks between languages in case only some scenes need different captions.
Wow
I didn't realise Matroska could do that. I'll certainly take a look at that, thanks!
Not just Matroska...
But OGM does this as well. I have a number of videos I've encoded with multiple audio and subtitle tracks. Plus, there are significantly more authoring tools with OGM support than the still-young Matroska format
Screencasts
If it was not clear, the point of my last comment was that I think you should share the work, maybe by supplying some "raw" videos (I know virtually nothing about videos, more about photos) and let the translaters "mount" the new subtitles/audio tracks. Anyway there will be a point at which the work will be too much as the number of translations grows...
I understand
Due to the license there is of course nothing stopping any of the loco teams taking the videos and re-dubbing them and hosting them locally on their ubuntu-XX.org domain, uploading them to google or wherever they want. It's the main reason they are released under the cc-by-sa-3.0, so that others can take and modify them. All you/they need to do is ensure that the attribution to the screencast team stays intact. Not too much to ask I don't think :)
I feel it would be nice to have a central repository for them, on the main screencast site, but see no reason why people shouldn't also mirror their local dubbed version on their site. The screencast site is syndicated on planet ubuntu so we can make high profile announcements about these kinds of co-operative tasks.
However, if (for example) the French Loco site gets more visits from French-speakers than we do on the main screencast site then it makes total sense from my point of view for them to be hosted or linked from there.
I am concerned that some loco teams may not have the resources to manage and host the videos, but we can of course do what we can to streamline the process and fully document how the videos are created to make that less of a problem.
Screencasts
Hi,
Sorry for my english. I guess a solution would be to contact the communities that are devoted to ubuntu in the concerned countries. For example ubuntu-fr.org would be the most appropriate place to broadcast your french-subtitled/translated videos. May be the persons who want to make the translation could contact directly the respective communities to get a web page to upload them to... Sorry I can't get involved in this, but as I thought of this solution...
Best,
Alexandre
Just curious but is there
Just curious but is there really a need for so many different versions of the files in the first place if you're concerned about space?
Why not just simply offer:
Google Video Link
High Res Ogg Link
Flash Download Link
That might allow for additional languages to be offered if space is the issue.
archive.org offers all the storage space and bandwidth you need.
The Internet Archive offers gratis storage space and bandwidth. Files can be uploaded via FTP and a webpage and linked to directly. You can upload as much as you like.
This is true
My local LUG upload videos there, and I initially uploaded my first screncasts to archive.org. Thanks for reminding me.
A good point.
One thing that came up in a past screencast team meeting was that people on low speed connection links would prefer to be able to have a lower bandwidth version to download. In addition we found that the high resolution videos (1024x768 at the time) would crash some peoples media players. I _think_ this was limited to people running Ubuntu on laptops with the Intel video chipset, using the i810 driver. This amounts to a surprisingly high number of people. So it was decided that we'd have low res versions to cater for these people.
I suggest we might want to look at the stats for which videos are popular - both downloaded directly from the site, and also via the podcast feeds and maybe drop the less popular ones if space becomes an issue.
I'll bring that up at the next Screencast Team Meeting. Thanks for the suggestion.
Subtitling
How do one make a SRT file? What tool in Ubuntu? Ideally playing with a video at the same time so that we can add the subtitle in the right place?
Finally I've found the screencast a great idea...but I never knew that they came with an audio clip...you see, I'm deaf! So if there are extra information being provided via audio, then I'm missing out on those.
Two way it can be done - overlay a sign language interpreter in corner - screamingly time-consuming!
English subtitle (hence me asking for how to make a SRT subtitle)
Heh
You know as a hearing person I just assumed that people would know there was an audio track. This is of course a dumb assumption on my part. Ok this reinforces the need for subtitles even further.
SRT files can be made with subtitleeditor in Ubuntu and I'm sure other packages exist for other platforms. I only recently learned about them myself.
The flash based player we use on the site supports subtitles, I just need to figure out how to construct it all to be future proof for when other languages come along.
Aside from "Making more screencasts", the subtitle issue is top of my list.
are dubbing and subtitles enough?
it almost seems like a waste to me to translate the audio when the video itself is still going to be in english. One of the great things about Ubuntu is that it's available in so many languages, if people watching these in other languages then go and install ubuntu in their chosen language surely their options and menus and the like will be different too?
maybe this doesn't matter but i think it's worth a thought before commiting to re-dubbing all the screencasts
A fair point
Re-making the screencasts in other languages is something we certainly need, but as a stop-gap I suspect audio dubbing would be useful nonetheless. If people are willing to take the time to transcribe then translate the transcription then record the audio and send it to me, I wonder doesn't that indicate that people are willing to accept the compromise of translating only "half" the story.
Being a typical brit that only knows English I cannot of course speak for people who have English as a second language. I know when I have taught courses (in real life) I have had comments from people for whom English is not their first language that they actually prefer to have the whole course in English - that is the printed matter and the lecturers talking.
Would be useful if we could get some comments from some people to gauge opinion.
A good stop gap
I'm a Brit that does speak another language a bit. I'd think that having audio dubbed into another language would still be useful, even if the video is still in English - but only as long as the interface is consistent across languages. I can help a Chinese colleague with problems he has on his Windows laptop (in Chinese) because I'm familiar with the menu layout and what the icons mean. I think the same applies here. Native language screencasts would obviously be better, but there you go.
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