Tag: captioning

Mechanical Turk for transcribing audio recordings and captioning

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I sometimes record lectures or meetings for later reference, and have found Mechanical Turk to be an efficient and affordable method for transcribing them. It can be quite confusing to get started using MTurk though, and the available blogs on the subject don’t really help you navigate the current MTurk interface, so here is the step-by-step process I use to have a lecture transcribed:

Cut your audio into 5 or 10 minute clips

Download Audacity – a free audio editing tool that works on both Windows and Mac.

Import your voice-recording file. (File > Import >Audio)

If you see a warning about FFMpeg being missing, just ignore it.

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How to get captions to play in embedded Windows Media Player

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Creating SAMI files for Windows Media Player is now quite easy, using Subtitle Workshop, but I had a lot of trouble getting captions to play correctly. They would play just fine locally on my hard drive, but once I put them on a webserver, they wouldn’t play at all.

That made me think it was a path problem, but finding the exact solution was tough.

Here’s my canned solution for embedding a windows media player in a web page, adapted from Microsoft’s instructions which do not seem to work for me.
The example shown here is for a Windows2K web server, with the video being streamed off a windows media streaming server.

I started with instructions from this page.

I tried using their clever little selector which lets you change styles and languages, but got a lot of javascript errors, although it mostly worked. I gave up on it after a while, and simplified things. You need 4 files:

  • index.html – the html file that people will use to view the embedded movie
  • movie.wmv – the windows media file
  • movie.smi – the caption file
  • movie.asx – the file that refers to the windows media file with a path
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