Subtitles are fantastic to get a wider reach for your video be it to make it more accessible to hearing impared audiences or foreign language users. As digital video and video on the web allow us to deal with subtitles in various ways. We will look at background of differnet kinds of subtitls and take a closer look at creating some of the more open versions.

Closed Captions v Open Captions

The term "closed" (versus "open") indicates the ability for viewers to turn on or off the captions. "Open captions," "burned-in" or "hardcoded" captions are visible to all viewers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_captioning

Closed captions are generally better for open video as they often allow us to alter the subtitles or to more easily translate them.

Playing Video Captions Online

Many video sharing systems allow you to play captions and subtitles on top of your video files. The used of closed captions allow you to choose different language possibilities rather than having only the subtitles of only one language burned into your video. Below we can see a video with English subtitles selected.

The same video shown on the Papuan Voices website has been translated into many languages. These can be selected in the online video player.

The system for displaying and creating subtitles used by the Papuan Voices website is Amara which is hosted on universalsubtitles.org

We can see that this page allows you to download the video file and the subtitle files separately. We will do this in our mission to understand more about how these kinds of subtitles work.

Click on the Download Subtitle link. We will be given the option to open or save a subtitle file of the type .srt.

If we open up the file that we download we will see that it is really pretty simple listing times and the text to be displayed over the video.

Playing SRT Files with VLC player

Now that we have downloaded our video file and subtitle file we can also download them on our desktop computer.

To do this,

Other Ways of Creating SRT Files

SRT files have been widely adopted for this reason. They are simple and they do the job well. There are many tools on the desktop which we can use to create these files. Jubler, Subtitle Workshop, Gnome subtitles. This can be handy if we want to subtitle our files off line. 

Task

Use Amara or a desktop subtitler to create an srt subtitle file and play it in VLC to test it.