http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTvHIDKLFqcBack in the dark ages, my parents subscribed to Showtime. Before a movie that was closed-captioned would air, their house announcer would intone, “The following presentation is closed-captioned for the hearing impaired”. They would then jokingly say “what?” But this was also back in the day before televisions shipped with closed-caption decoders built-in. And not a moment too soon, as my wife and I have noted: the kids these days are playing their loud booming cars ever louder, to the point where we are thinking it’s time to invest in hearing aid manufacturers. (No, we’re younger than we sound; we’re not sitting on our front porch, drinking lemonade and swinging our canes at the kids to get off our lawn.)

Ahem. But the innovation of the day comes from YouTube, who is using the power of having a ton of servers to create subtitles (which they are technically incorrectly referring to as closed captions; but then again, people know what closed captions are) for some education channels and all Google channels. You can also add your own captions from a script; YouTube will automatically work out the timings for you, so you won’t need to provide any timecode data. But, once your video is subtitled, you can download the timecode data that YouTube has calculated with all of your subtitles, so this could theoretically help you add captions to other types of media that you’re going out to (DVD or Blu-ray Disc, anyone?)

There’s also language translation capabilities here that appear to work well in the videos we’ve played with, but even Google admits that they’re not quite perfect (though they are often better than nothing, particularly if you don’t know the language being spoken in the video you’re viewing.)