How I created Czech subtitles

At first, I had no idea how subtitles are added to online videos. The only way to get Czech subtitles I knew was producing a *.srt and store it in the same directory and under same name as the video itself. But youtube does not offer download of a video...

Fortunately, this NASA piece had written subtitles which can be displayed as a text file by clicking on the icon below the video. I've marked and copied it, then it was easy to write a Czech text below each English one. Then I've developed a series of recipes for sed to obtain Czech subtitles in srt format (and a simpler lrc one, which seems being not much supported). Those two scripts and another one, converting coding from il2 to utf8 are here as *.sh, symlinked to readable *.sh.txt.

Then I found that vimeo NASA site offers a download of the video (moreover, in 3 resolutions). The old way of having the *.mp4 and *.srt file together under same name was solved this way. This might do for devoted teachers, but not for general public. At least, having subtitles inside the *.mp4 would be needed.

Searching further I found that existing subtitles can be translated and made working online through Amara. So I made and account there and it worked, see here. The remaining problem was that the original English subtitles included (as "CC") in the youtube video displayed too and had to be switched off before viewing it with Czech titles comfortably. And that the Czech ones did not display in fullscreen mode - the only way to see video large enough was changing page size by ctrl+. A wonderful feature of Amara is that the subtitles can be downloaded as separate files in several formats including *.srt (so my programming effort had been obsolete after all).

Then I found that youtube allows including subtitles to films, if you have make/have an account and upload a video there. The prepared *.srt, or even several of them, may be included as "CC" into the online version of video. It was rather inconvenient to uploade a video which was not mine, but I hope that NASA outputs can be used this way in good will and for good. Of course, having a way to include further languages directly onto the NASA youtube/vimeo sites would be much preferable. Ideal possibility would be embedding a video on any site (like I did now in handbrake.fr, an open source programme. ffmpeg should be able to do the same through command line, but not in its standard compilation in debian/squeeze I use.

	Name	Last modified	Size	Description
	Parent Directory		-
	2ndOnly_lrc.sh	2014-05-26 09:22	566
	2ndOnly_lrc.sh.txt	2014-05-26 09:22	566
	2ndOnly_srt.sh	2014-05-26 12:47	941
	2ndOnly_srt.sh.txt	2014-05-26 12:47	941
	cz.lrc	2014-05-27 10:25	4.4K
	cz.srt	2014-05-27 10:24	6.4K
	cz8.lrc	2014-05-27 10:25	4.8K
	en.txt	2014-05-26 09:09	4.0K
	en_cz.txt	2014-05-27 10:24	7.5K
	il2_to_utf8.sh	2014-05-26 09:36	140
	il2_to_utf8.sh.txt	2014-05-26 09:36	140
	czAmara.srt	2014-05-27 13:52	7.3K	Czech subtitles / české titulky
	cz8.srt	2014-05-27 10:24	6.7K	Czech subtitles / české titulky, crude timing