TDI Executive Director Claude Stout, an NVRC News reader, sent some additional information about 22frames.com and its exciting index of Internet captioning after we reported on Hulu.com’s captioning search feature on 12/21/09. 22frames is in beta version right now.
About 22frames.com – From Their “About Us” Page
The World Health Organization estimates 278 million people worldwide have some form of hearing impairment.
A Nielsen study suggests that there has been over a 300 percent increase in online video watching since 2003. Further, most watching is done during work hours. Workplace computers are often muted or have no speakers.
Several billions of videos are watched monthly worldwide, with many of them in different languages.
22frames indexes captioned videos from all over the Internet. The web offers a world of quality videos for our enjoyment and enlightenment. However, for a large population of Internet users* who are unable to hear, understand, or enable the audio content of videos, finding ones to watch can be a pain**. Captioned and subtitled videos are an answer; however, they are generally scattered and/or mixed with all other videos across the Internet. Up until now, there was no central place to easily and reliably search for and discover such videos across multiple video hosts.
22frames was built, in part, to provide such a place. In turn, an additionally important goal is to drive significant traffic to caption/subtitle friendly video hosts and creators.
By continually indexing videos from these multiple hosts, this site offers an increasingly comprehensive catalog covering many different topics. Indexing is mostly automated using APIs and specialized web crawlers. User submissions of videos and channels also play an important role.
22frames is more than captions.Captioned videos are not the only kinds of videos that are easy to watch without audio. Take a look at these diverse examples without listening to them:
There is such a considerable number of quality videos like the above being posted on popular link-sharing and community sites that we include them in our search results when relevant. On the right of this and other pages, you can even find links for viewing videos and reading comments shared on sites like Digg and Reddit. 22frames also links to captioned versions of videos shared on such sites as they are discovered.
If you have/run such a site and you would like to integrate our accessibility features with it, contact us. Members of your site can use these features to avoid mining through pages of community submissions to specifically find videos that are easy to watch without audio.
Including these special types of non-captioned videos is pretty experimental, but it makes sense not to ignore them in a service like this. To include these videos in your search results, make sure to choose this option . To omit them, choose the caption-only option .
You can imagine that a big challenge in supporting this unique feature is how to automatically detect and index videos without having a human listen to each one. There are just too many videos and several are being produced daily. Without getting into too much techie jargon, we can say that our current approach mainly involves some clever coding and training of a multimedia analysis platform called Infinite Ears. We currently support this specific feature on Youtube videos, and we will move to other hosts as more improvements are made. Please help us flag videos that do not fit so we can speed up these improvements.
When this site was nothing more than idea, someone said it would be “a kind of Silent Film 2.0.” This comment, in fact, led to the name 22frames. FYI: During the silent film era, films were often shot at rates anywhere between 16 and 23 frames per second. 22 sounded the coolest to us, and here we are!
- Thanks to NVRC, Fairfax
