MovieCaptioner keeps repeating a segment of the movie until you are done typing what you hear. Just hit the Return key and it will save your caption and automatically advance to the next few seconds of the movie, allowing you to zip through your captioning tasks in no time flat.

You don't need to be a QuickTime guru, either. The caption track is added automatically with the click of a button. And exporting Transcripts compiles all the captions into one concise text file, with or without timecode.

I've written about MovieCaptioner before - it used to be called MovCaptioner - but there have been significant improvements in both the interface and in the type of captions MovieCaptioner can read and create. The website now lists all these types of imports and exports:

• QT Text
• QT Unicode (export only)
• QT SMIL (export only)
• Flash DFXP
• JW Player
• CLF Player (Canada)
• Adobe Encore
• Sonic Scenarist SCC (for Final Cut Pro, line 21 close captions and iPod/iPad captions)
• Spruce (STL)
• SubRip (SRT)
• SubViewer (SUB)
• Windows Media (SAMI, export only)
• Text Transcripts
• HTML Transcripts (export only)
• YouTube SBV (import only)

I think the creation of Flash captions is especially exciting, given the number of uncaptioned Flash movies out there on the internet. Now that Flash supports simple captioning, and programs like MovieCaptioner let captioning be done for such a low price, there's absolutely no reason not to caption Flash movies and tutorials you make for your website.

MovieCaptioner will also import YouTube's auto-caption files so you can correct them and then re-upload them to YouTube for efficient and accurate YouTube captioning.

SynchriMedia offer several video tutorials for MovieCaptioner including a nifty one for how to use MovieCaptioner and [msd] together so you can caption your film quickly without even needing to type!

- Ricky Buchanan

MovCaptioner keeps repeating a segment of the movie until you are done typing what you hear. Just hit the Return key and it will save your caption and automatically advance to the next few seconds of the movie, allowing you to zip through your captioning tasks in no time flat.

You don't need to be a QuickTime guru, either. The caption track is added automatically with the click of a button.

I wrote about MovCaptioner before, but there have been significant improvements in both the interface and in the type of captions MovCaptioner can create. The website now lists all these types:

• QuickTime text, unicode and SMIL
• SMIL Caption Tracks
• Flash Caption Tracks
• SubRip SRT and SubViewer SUB Caption Tracks
• Spruce STL (imports into DVD Studio Pro)
• Adobe Encore Caption Tracks
• SAMI Caption Tracks (for use with Windows Media)
• Transcripts in Paragraph Form or Line-by-line With Timestamps

I think the creation of Flash captions is especially exciting, given the number of uncaptioned Flash movies out there on the internet. Now that Flash supports simple captioning, and programs like MovCaptioner let captioning be done for such a low price, there's absolutely no reason not to caption Flash movies and tutorials you make for your website.

- Ricky Buchanan

CapScribe is an open-source application to help you add captions and/or audio description to audio and video files. Here's their explanations of what captions and video descriptions are:

Captions provide viewers with text-based, verbatim dialog, background sounds, and sound effects, key for deaf and hard of hearing viewers, and beneficial for hearing viewers as well.

Video descriptions provide verbal descriptions of what is happening visually in the video. Description makes it possible for people with vision disabilities to more fully comprehension the video. Sighted people may find video description benficial as well!

It's great to see an application like this available for free - captioning and video description programs can often run to hundreds of dollars, well out of the reach of casual or non-professional users.

- Ricky Buchanan

If you're in the USA, the iTunes Store now allows you to easily search for movies with Closed Captions available.

The feature was rolled out earlier this week, and can be accessed using the iTunes Store's "Power Search".

You can either go into the Movies section and then select Power Search from the store menu, or select Power Search first and then "Movies" from the pop-up menu. There's a new checkbox "Search movies that are available with Closed Captioning" under the row of edit text fields, as this screen clip shows:

If you click the checkbox then click the Search button with no other fields filled in, it'll show you all movies with Closed Captioning available - currently 53 in the USA store.

The checkbox for searching Closed Captions doesn't appear when searching for TV Shows in the USA store, or at all in any of the other country's stores as far as I can tell. I hope that once captioned material is available in these other locations that the search function will become active there too.

- Ricky Buchanan

The deafmac.org blog has posted a list of captioned movies currently available in the iTunes Store, by which I assume they mean the USA iTunes Store. Only twenty one captioned movies so far, but hopefully the number will grow quickly.

Does anybody have news about iTunes stores in other countries and whether captioned movies are available?

- Ricky Buchanan

(Via deafmac.org.)