Editing Transcripts of Your YouTube Video

CSU Accessibility requirements state that any YouTube video you publish on-line have an accurate transcript of what is being said. If you worked with a script, that's fairly easy to do; just upload the script as a transcript (more on this at the end of the post).

If you don't have a script, it's a bit more difficult. But the job is made much easier by YouTube's own automatic transcription. It will contain many errors (some unintentionally humorous), but the bulk of the transcription will be done, and all you need do is edit the errors.

After you upload your video, go to the Toolbox above the video and choose Captions on the dropdown on the right-hand side (see the figure below).

Click anywhere in the box just below Machine Transcriptions (see figure below).

You'll see a copy of YouTube's transcript. Click the Download button at the bottom (see figure below).

You'll download a file called captions.sbv. It can be opened in Windows Notepad or the free text editing software TextEdit (available here). Make your corrections. Use >> to indicate a change in who is speaking; use brackets to indicate other aural events (e.g. - [applause]). Ignore the numbers; they are timecodes that tell Youtube when to show the text.
Last step: upload the new transcript. Go back to that Captions tab, and this time click the Add New Captions or Transcript (see figure at right).
Make sure you have Caption file chosen (see figure below), then upload your edited transcript. Delete the machine transcription and you're good to go.

One final note: if you already have a script, you can skip to the last step.  Save the transcript as a .txt file and upload it as a Transcript file (see figure above).

Linking to Specific Spots on a YouTube Video

Most of you know how to link to a YouTube video. You go to the YouTube page and copy the link in the address bar (or, alternately, click Share below the video and copy the link).

What you may not know (and I didn't know til last week) is that you can easily change the link so a video will start at a certain point in the middle of the video. Just click Share, then Options on a video page. The screenshot at left shows the YouTube dialogue box.

You can also simply add #t= and the number of minutes and seconds at the end of the URL. For example, if you wanted to start at 4 minutes and 7 seconds, add #t=4m7s to the end of the URL and you're done!

 In the example link below, I added #t=0m13s to the end of the URL, which will start the video 13 seconds into it, or right before the rocket launches.

http://www.youtube.com/embed/m6nTibKZLFA#t=0m13s

Thanks to Darrin Goodman for the tip.

Embedding YouTube Videos Into PowerPoint

You can embed a YouTube video directly into a PowerPoint presentation, so that it plays in a tidy little window on your presentation slide, rather than the YouTube site.

Go to the YouTube video you want to embed. Click the Share button just below the video.



Scroll down the page to the Embed button. Click it. Before you copy the code, make sure you check the "Use old embed code option" option (note: not all videos allow this option). Then click inside the embed code, right-click, and choose Copy.



Go into PowerPoint, and navigate to the slide you want to embed the video into. Choose Insert. Choose the little drop-down arrow just below the video icon (this will be in the upper right of your screen). Choose "Video From Web Site"

A dialogue box will appear. Paste your code into the box (right-click, choose Paste), then click the Insert button. A black box will appear on your slide, which you can resize by dragging one of the corner sizing circles (using the corners will keep the width-to-height ratio the same). When you go into Slideshow mode in PowerPoint, a screenshot of the the Youtube video will appear. Click the center of the screenshot to play the video.



Thanks to Gisele Jefferson for posing the question.