By Cheryl Heppner, 8/13/09
Google Video announced in April 2008 that it had a new advanced search feature to locate captioning. Today I decided to take a quick look to see how it has evolved.
I started by going to the Google Videos – Advanced Video Search at http://video.google.com/videoadvancedsearch and only checking the Subtitles box for “search only closed captioned videos” before clicking on “Search Videos.”
Of the first ten results from this search, I only saw captions on the “Harry Potter Parodie” except for an occasional bit of text on the other videos.
Next I decided to enter a word in the “Find Results” section to see what would come up. The first word that came to me out of the blue was Dexter. I typed it and again clicked “Search Videos,” which brought four pages of results. The first page mostly had season 4 promos for the television series starring Michael C. Hall. Lots of these Dexter videos had Spanish captions and one appears to be in Portuguese. Calling reader Joe Duarte! For German readers there’s a 10-minute video of Noam Chomsky speaking on Unaccountable Private Tyrannies in Oldenburg in 2004. I thought I spotted Italian captions too.
I was disappointed to find that the intriguingly titled “Tic Tic Tac Hamsters” was also captioned only in Spanish, though Dexter Babcock captioned his story “Ultimate Adventure of All Time” in English. There were 13 segments, each 10 minutes in length, of the movie “Round Midnight” posted with captions just under two weeks ago.
Then there was the discovery of a funky video from the McGill Dentistry White Coat Ceremony in 2008 where the speaker tries to channel Dr. Seuss. All of these things just from typing “Dexter”! Clearly it helps to be really specific in your searches, but then you’d miss a lot of offbeat stuff.
So ends today’s adventure of checking out one website a day…I’d be interested in hearing from others who regularly watch captioned videos on the web about tips, tricks, and favorites.
- Thanks to NVRC, Fairfax
