Subtitles for Youtube Videos

Brilliant idea. That was my first thought when I heard about Overstream, a service where users can add subtitles to videos found on popular video portals such as Youtube or Google Video. I can see two major applications for this website. The first is to create subtitles from videos and offer them to users that speak a different language.

It would be a great service for his visitors if a Spanish webmaster would add Spanish subtitles to English videos that he found on Youtube for instance. The second is to create new content by adding the subtitles. This can be done in a humorous way, to add a comment or additional sources.

The interface of Overstream is easy to use. Users have to signup to be able to add subtitles to videos though. Once they are logged in they can use a url from a supported video portal to create a video with subtitles. The video is loaded into the interface and subtitles can be created by choosing a interval on the timeline. By default all subtitles remain for three seconds on screen which can be changed in the interface to suit your needs.

Basic video controls are available to test the subtitles. The user can stop, pause, forward, rewind and play videos. Videos can then be saved and are published on the Overstream website. Another nice feature ? You can load and save subtitles in the srt format.

The only downside at the moment is the lack of videos on the website. Roughly 900 are available which is probably the figure that gets added to Youtube each minute.