YouTube videos without Share button, or best way to get captions on videos

[sds]

Hey guys - We're in a competitive market, so keeping our full-blown technical & training content limited is important. Our knowledge base files are published to an FTP site, and the content is launched in a secure browser that can only be accessed from the software. For years, we've embedded .mp4 or .webm files into it for videos. It's worked out great, other than the downside here and there that someone can't watch the videos because they don't have speakers. I'm cringing thinking of the day a deaf user comes on board and we don't have captions.

We use Camtasia to edit the videos. We have some options there as far as burning the captions straight into the videos, but I was really hoping for a traditional closed caption player where someone can toggle them on/off.

I've found a couple of posts like this one: viewtopic.php?t=31194 But maybe I'm a little confused about NorthWest's answer... where does the caption file go?

I figured YouTube would be a great solution. Camtasia can publish straight to YouTube with the caption file of my choice, or YouTube just generates them automatically. But that darn Share button is the kicker. I went down a rabbit hole today looking for ways to embed a YouTube video and use HTML, Java, iFrame, anything to disable the Share button without also disabling the controls, and I'm not having any luck.

Any tips are welcome!

[andrewb]

The subtitle file (as in NorthWest's example) is the VTT file referenced in the <track> element. We save our subtitle files in the same folder as our videos in the Flare project, so you just need to make sure the link points to the file. If you ever needed translations of your captions, they would sit in separate tracks.
Given that you are working with Camtasia, it is likely your captions are SRT files. You need to convert your SRTs to VTT to add captions to the <video> elements. The files are very similar, and it is easy to find an online converter. The benefit of using VTT over SRT is that you can style the content... add italics and bolding and so on.

[sds]

Thank you! Okay, I think this makes more sense to me today. I was down the rabbit hole and everything was making me bleary eyed. I was mainly confused about where that CC file would go - inside the Flare project, or sitting outside of it somewhere. Inside the Videos folder and pointing to it makes sense.

Yes, Camtasia CC files are .srt.

It's worth giving it a try. I'm still unsure if the CC option will even show up in the player. It's not there now, but maybe just because no file is detected. The way we have everything distributed is a little strange. Because we keep things private and un-downloadable, our users launch our knowledge base from inside the software. It opens in a derivation of Microsoft's Web View, which I think is based off Chromium. Our software can be installed locally, but we also have a Cloud product where our users connect in and use the software remotely. My IT/development team decided this was the best approach across the board. Our Flare files are hosted on the FTP site, and this browser is like a private display. I'm not super knowledgeable about the nitty gritty beyond that since I mainly oversee the project itself, but I know when it was originally put in place, we'd found that for the video portion of the knowledge base, we could only display .webm videos. If I remember correctly, they were the only video file that had the necessary player controls. At the time, I wasn't considering CC.

We recently made an update to the browser, so it's possible additional video files can be displayed and used.

Anyway, I'm going to build one of the videos with a CC file and get it into the project and see how it goes.

Thanks again!

[andrewb]

Good luck. If this doesn't work for you, I'd recommend using Vimeo over YouTube because it doesn't have the Share button you want to avoid provided you use a setting other than Public for your video. This should work in your use case. If you use Vimeo, you can upload the SRT file too. This would save you having to convert the file to VTT.

[sds]

Thanks for the tip! I got pulled away on other things today, so I'm going to try out the captions file trick ASAP. Otherwise, will consider Vimeo.

[NorthEast]

If you're using embedded Chromium, that only supports open source video formats (such as webm). So that's likely to be the reason you're using webm, and can't use formats like mp4 which are not open source.

[sds]

Update on this ... I got close, but not close enough.

To start off with, I used NorthWest's code exactly before experimenting, and I also put the .vtt file in the same folder as the .webm file:

Code: Select all

                    
<video id="video1" controls="">
	<source type="video/webm" src="../Resources/Multimedia/VideoName.webm" />
	<track kind="captions" src="../Resources/Multimedia/VideoNameCaptions.vtt" srclang="en" label="English captions" />
</video>                  

The CC option is there, with English captions as an option, but nothing happens when it's selected.

I'm confident that the .vtt file is good because when I launch the .webm video in Windows Movies & TV, I can browse for the .vtt file and it works.

Thank you both for your contributions to my effort!

[sds]

*****EDIT***** To start, I just realized I keep saying "NorthWest". Sorry about that.

Second, I'm now reading the bit about it not working if you launch it locally, which is what I was doing this morning, and I was also seeing the error. I tried publishing it to our web server and it's still not quite there. I'm seeing an option to turn on Closed Captions, but when I select it, the option disappears and no captions appear, which tells me that the Chromium browser might not want to load the .vtt file either. After doing some Googling on this aspect of it, it might be something I have to take the administrators of the web server. If you have any ideas, they're welcome, but otherwise, thanks again for your help. This is a good start, regardless.