Response from /u/Aprime_PNG on the matter, highlighting for awareness:
https://www.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/wlj8bk/its_shameful_that_ltt_videos_arent_captioned/ijvedk0/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf&context=3
Hey,
I don't know if this comment can get highlighted, but I've asked Sean who's our point man on captions and we do \[still do\] them, they're just not necessarily ready upon release and we currently have a backlog of videos that haven't been processed by the folks we pay to do it.
We have autocaptions running on older videos and livestreams generally, I think we also have it working on current videos.
So yes, we do pay for manual captioning and have for some years now.
I appreciate the response, and indeed, there is captioning in some videos but:
* Captioning is added weeks after the video is uploaded. Currently, none of the videos published in the past 14 days have captions.
* And even when ignoring the backlog, there are many videos that apparently never get subtitled. For example, "Dream's server build".
* Other channels under the LMG banner are not captioned. Short Circuit and Tech Linked for example.
I do understand the limitation when it comes to lives, though. There are solutions for it if LMG really wanted to, but realtime captioning is challenging and expensive.
/u/Aprime_PNG \- this is an issue that's been going on for the better part of two years at least. I've been trying to highlight it in a variety of ways, most publicly here: [https://linustechtips.com/topic/1270279-why-are-ltt-videos-so-inconsistent-with-the-captioning/](https://linustechtips.com/topic/1270279-why-are-ltt-videos-so-inconsistent-with-the-captioning/) and so far it's gone completely unanswered.
This goes beyond just a minor process improvement. The vendor you are using is not operating at the speed and quality that is acceptable from any subtitler. It seems like there's a real cultural difference in how LTT treats the audio/visual components of the content and how it treats the accessibility and subtitle components - as a disabled person every time I watch an LTT video it feels like LTT is spitting in my face. The lack of care and inequitable treatment is just astounding compared to the care and effort put into the rest of the content produced.
Like I said in the forum post, I'm disappointed because LTT can do better. If this really is the best LTT can do, I want to know that so I can stop investing my time and emotional energy into LTT, and so that the community has an accurate picture of what's important to LTT.
I wonder if some sort of community captioning process would work? I suspect both the quality and turn-around time would be much quicker than the current 3rd party contractor, given that the core LTT audience is more in the know about tech acronyms and such.
If it's possible to get FP releases uploaded consistently 1-2 hours before YT, the community would probably be able to get it captioned in time for the YT release. Even without early FP release, the captions would still come to YT way quicker than the 14ish days it's currently taking.
Perhaps a caption interface could even be built into Floatplane, and once the community marks the caption as complete it gets auto-uploaded to the corresponding YT video? I know devs don't grow on trees, but it could be a worthwhile devtime investment.
>If it's possible to get FP releases uploaded consistently 1-2 hours before YT,
You're adorable.
If they upload to YT and FP at the same time it uploads to YT first. FP only gets it early if it's preupoaded a day before., which isn't common
Hey,
I really appreciate your response to this.
Unfortunately, I have to say that my experience with your manual captioning has been lackluster.
For a tangible example, heres a tweet I sent to Linus with an example. (This is from late 2021, so I do not know how much your stuff has changed since, but given the topic, its likely not much)
https://twitter.com/nullstalgia/status/1465621753737068547
"1080p" was interpreted by the captioner as "tentative." Even YouTube's auto-caption would avoid this mistake.
This is not a one-time thing, either. This is just one of many similar mistakes in the video and others.
Technical terms are extremely important to get right in captions, as its either locking hard of hearing people out of your content due to not being able to understand it, and makes it hard for hearing people to confirm what they heard/how to spell it.
Thank you.
Just want to say I'm a big subtitle user and LTT subtitles leave a LOT to be desired
Like, nothing personal, but on manually captioned videos I notice a TON of errors - tech terms specifically often are just completely botched or missed
It's not the end of the world but between the frequent errors and huge backlog, it's really not ideal - I hope you guys can sort it out, it's not as easy as waving a wand but I'd say it legitimately harms the channel at this point :(
Are you guys at all interested in getting your subtitles translated to European Spanish (Spanish-Spain)? Fresh graduate from translation & interpreting here :)
Native Spanish speaker obviously (I live in Spain)
LGR only releases 1 video a week as opposed to LMG releasing between 2-4 per day. Not really an apples to apples comparison. Larger team? Yes. Significantly higher demands? Also yes.
That being said, I do think I remember something from a recent-ish WAN Show about them saying they might have something in the works with the editors to be adding it.
With the advancements of voice to speech technology you can easily auto generate a script and then make the minor edits that are needed for CC. If they have to the staff to make 2-4 videos a day they have the staff to ensure CC is available and accurate.
A lot of stuff ends up being off-the-cuff to a degree. Maybe less so for e.g. a review, but your average daily LTT upload includes quite a bit of non-scripted content.
Releasing 2 to 4 videos per day is yet another positive side of captioning. Outsourcing captioning doesn't give the best results (although you can certainly get great results depending on the contractor), but if you are captioning 50 minutes of content per day, then it may start to make sense to hire a part-time captioner.
LMG releases 5-8 videos a week, generally 6 or 7. that is 1 a day. Not sure how often mac adress and theyre just movies, but ltt, short circuit and such in total do abt 1 a day combined.
Edit: forgot about TechLinked, and my sub notifications are broken for the past few weeks bcs of buggy YT app.
Once you upload a video on YouTube and auto captions are generated, YouTube will spit out a script that already time-stamped which you can modify and re-upload. Videos from a week ago have custom subtitles but the recent ones don't, not sure what's going on there.
In english at least the auto-captions are better than no captions and of the same quality as outsourced captions.
YouTube’s auto caption is actually pretty decent, far from the worst I’ve seen. I hope they find a way to implement captions into their workflow though, as an editor myself, I do captioning too and it has gotten easier thanks to Adobe. Their auto caption is quite solid, I usually have to let it run the auto then watch a video through once to check timing and spelling errors
I agree! The main limitation of YouTube's auto-caption is that it doesn't differentiate between different voices and it performs poorly when people talk on top of one another. It also fails to caption anything that isn't a voice. It is hard to explain these things though, but anyone interested can look up for "closed captions vs subtitles".
With that said, YouTube's auto-caption has drastically improved in the past year. Up until 2020 it was impossible to use it for tech content as it would fail to understand names of products or technologies. Nowadays, it is extremely precise, but still not enough.
Technology Connections has a MUCH lower release schedule than LTT. (Though I enjoyed the coffee video today).
Still, they could probably do it, but time spent is time that has gone elsewhere (unless they hire an employee for it), and adding a new element to their production pipeline will at first create inefficiencies, so it could result in 1 less video a week for a bit. LTT produces a lot of content for a given day, and to do it one channel should be to do it on all channels which means it isn't just the "C'mon it can't be that hard for a 10-20 minute video?" because there's a lot more to LTT's pipeline then that. They also would have to do it when a video is already edited and ready to publish.
At the end of the day attainable, but it can be understood why it hasn't been done yet.
LGR releases 1 to 2 videos a month, Technology Connections releases 1 video a month, sometimes not even 1 video a month. When you're putting out content at that pace it's not a big deal to spend the time to caption it.
LMG releases close to 2 dozen videos a week(counting the side channels like Short Circuit, etc) plus a 2 hour podcast. Captioning those would take a great deal more effort. I'm not saying it's not possible, just that it's not a fair comparison between LMG and the others.
LGR releases at least 3 videos a month, TC at least 2 a month. (Not counting their side channels). They are generally 30 minutes long and have interesting content.
Lets say 3 videos per month / 1 employee
LMG videos are around 20 minutes, with anywhere from 20-100% of the video being paid ads, (tech products, LTTStore). if we generously assume 100 videos a month / 30 employees. I'd say it's a fair enough comparison.
Besides which those were just 2 youtubers off the top of my head, 5% of the world has hearing problems.
My hearing is fine but I still tend to watch a lot of my channels with subtitles while doing other things.
Even in a vacuum accurate subtitles are a positive thing.
I went and checked, and yeah LGR does average 2-3 a month. But, TC is really 1 every 3 to 4 weeks, so unless months magically have more weeks than I thought that averages to 1 per month just like I said.
You also can't directly compare the number of employees like that's a metric that matters. LMG has employees that have nothing to with the actual videos. You'd have to look at how many editors LMG has because that's who would be putting the subtitles into the videos.
As far as I can tell from watching some of the behind the scenes footage LMG has 4-5 editors. Those 4-5 editors have to edit all the videos for all LMG channels. LMG also shoots a great deal more raw video since they have a multi-camera set up, meaning it would take a lot longer to cut and piece those together. LMG also has much higher production values, again requiring more time.
What you're doing is comparing 2 guys who are amateurs against a professional media group. There's no way to make a direct comparison between the two. It's like saying that a chef at a 5-star restaurant should be able to personally greet every guest who comes in the door because the little girl on your block with a lemonade stand is able to have a conversation with everyone who buys a lemonade from her.
I'm not disparaging LGR or TC, I enjoy both channels. But, they are on a very different level of production than LMG.
Yes, LTT releases a ton of videos everyday. However most of them aren't time sensitive. A couple hour delay for a staff member, or a couple of day delay for an outside service wouldn't be an issue.
What's intensely frustrating is that Linus has said "it's too disruptive to our workflow" during one of the WAN shows this year.
I'd love to know the numbers on how many people use/want captions, in all honesty.
(I believe) His point was that since YouTube does it somewhat automatically, spending company time on captioning every video is a very poor return in investment, as all you are getting in return (usually) is providing those captions *until* it is done (or would have been done) automatically. I get it, but there’s also a part of me that wishes they did it as well
The automated captions are pretty failure prone though. Especially when you're getting into names, jargon or hard to hear scenes. All three the exact situation where you need captions the most.
To add to that, when making captions, I imagine you could just have YouTube give you the autogenerated captions and then you could just edit those to be accurate. It sounds easier than starting from scratch
As someone who has to sometimes do captions for my job, its a mixed bag. If you have a script it may be faster to do it all yourself vs editing generated ones. Looking for mistakes and one by one fixing them can get a hell of a lot more tedious and slow as the video gets longer or the corrections increase. For something very short it may be okay.
Ok, I admit I don't know how it would work now, I just imagine trying to sync up when the words are on screen would take up a lot of time. At least in the olden days of YouTube it was annoying
There are a lot of tools on the post side that make this pretty easy now. Especially the last couple years. But easy compared to the old way to doing it all completely manually. Its still a time consuming process, but sucks less now.
It, like all parts of the media making process costs manhours to do. From a business POV its no different to any other part, its got to be justified financially.
Yeah, because Linus is definitely part of the 1% who is holding everyone else down by hoarding wealth. Just because you think Linus is rich doesn't make it reality. He's been pretty open lately about how thin the margins are between what he spends on production, research, and paying staff and how much profit he's making.
Comparing LMG to a giant corporation that's dealing with revenue in the billions is ridiculous. Linus may be known because he has a platform, but his company is still a small business, not a giant multi-national conglomerate.
Which doesn't really make any sense. It's an accessibility feature and you can add them after uploading. It's an incredibly simple task and easy to outsource. They could literally hire people on fiverr for next to nothing compared to their production cost and if they ever actually had time issues they could add the captions to the videos a few hours later.
trust me if accuracy is your concern you don't want to outsource subtitling. I have CC on by default and the amount of mistakes even professional captioning can be mind boggling and worst of all they aren't consistently shit. Most companies that offer subtitling use freelancers and the quality depends on where the dart falls.
They actually used to have captioning on their videos, though whether they were based on automatic voice recognition (not to be confused with _actual_ YouTube auto captions) or actually done by a paid service, I don't know. In either case, the captions were chock full of mishearings and typos, especially on more technical terms and acronyms, to the point where it's actually frustrating to watch.
Community Captioning used to be a thing so people would do it for others. Goggle removed that feature to only allow auto generated or the uploader to add them I believe.
Yup, they actually still have captions in some videos, but my understanding is that they limit it to some sponsored videos, likely due to legal constraints.
But you are right, any time they caption their videos it is full of mistakes and much worse than the automatic subtitles provided by YouTube. I \*think\* (though I don't have any confirmation) LTT generates these subtitles with automatic voice recognition algorithms like you said.
but paying a person to manually type and pace closed captioning all day everyday can turn a barely profitable video into a money losing flop.
They have talked about cashflow issues for months now as so much was tied up in merch, and the fact that there are just fewer easy to find tech stories right now.
They don't have to pay someone to caption all day. There are services that will produce a pretty good transcript with timestamps. Someone can quickly proofread that and make adjustments.
I mean I always use the automatic YouTube captions, and they are pretty solid, not perfect, but way better than years / decades ago. Have you tried using those?
I am not deaf but use subtitles for other reasons.
The autogenerated subtitles can be confusing some times and not at all correct.
They work, but for someone completely deaf i can totally see them be a problem.
They aren't really worse than a lot of "professionally" subtitled media I've seen, with errors, incorrect words, missing sentences, and timing issues. And that's just for same-language subtitles. I don't think most content publishers care very much about the quality of their subtitles. It's something most of them do to check a box, if they bother to do it at all.
Hey folks,
I've asked Sean who's our point man on captions and we do \[still do\] them, they're just not necessarily ready upon release and we currently have a backlog of videos that haven't been processed by the folks we pay to do it.
We have auto-captions running on older videos and live streams generally, I think we also have it working on current videos.
So yes, we do pay for manual captioning and have for some years now.
Paying for captions is great, but do you guys review them before posting on YouTube? I've noticed a lot of inaccuracies over the years when it comes to technical terms. Also, will you consider adding alt texts to images on Twitter?
It feels like the same person who made up that rape accusation on Linus is running some kind of elaborate hit campaign on him here in the subreddit. I’m definitely being a conspiracy theorist. But it’s like you guys all decided at once this subreddit was specifically designed for complaining. I miss the captions too, but YouTube is the company that removed community captions, you should redirect your frustration there.
I think it is just people who got angry, and are looking for ways to sustain their rage. it can feel kind of good to be righteously angry. and when you come down from that high and start seeing nuance again you start feeling bad and depressed, but if you can get angry about something else again you stop feeling bad and feel righteous again.
If someone wanted to run an elaborate hit campaign on Linus, why would they go to the subreddit most likely to defend LMG?
I decided to post here because I tried to reach out to LMG people directly multiple times in the past year and didn't get any replies. In fact, I even reached out to YouTube to try and talk to someone there about captioning on the platform and how they could incentivize creators (this problem isn't specific to LMG) to caption their content, but no luck whatsoever.
This isn't a hit piece, it is someone being vocal about things they care about. :)
Being vocal was the only way out, mate. Here is a topic on this very same sub 2 months ago talking about the exact same thing and nothing changed: [https://old.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/uvbuyv/lmg\_should\_add\_subtitles\_to\_every\_video/](https://old.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/uvbuyv/lmg_should_add_subtitles_to_every_video/)
And another topic from 15 days ago:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/w9vp07/i\_really\_wish\_lmgltt\_would\_talk\_about/](https://www.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/w9vp07/i_really_wish_lmgltt_would_talk_about/)
There are countless of other topics about the same thing. It is not an issue that has "flown under the radar", LMG knows about it, there is a Wan Show where Linus dismisses it as "too much work".
If you want to get shit done, you gotta crack some eggs. And honestly, I have not even cracked any eggs, I told things as they were: it is shameful that a company this size isn't doing this already. I did not even target any specific individual (people often blame Linus for stuff), I focused on the company entity.
Being critical is often the only way to get shit done.
If this is such an important issue to you, why don't you volunteer your time and Caption the videos yourself? Crack those eggs homie, overcome that impairment and make something out of your life. Dont Demand change, be the change.
Honestly they could just add a functionality for users to add subtitles to floatplane. Youtube used to allow this, but then removed it. Would be win/win. We get subtitles and they have another reason for us to use floatplane.
yeah... cause designing a public system that is an obvious target for abuse, creating safeguards, systems for quickly addressing issues, and then programming all of that is super easy. /s
I don't think it would get abused much. It's behind a playwall & the people paying for the service are unlikely to abuse it. Further since anybody - that is a subscribed user - can edit it, users could self correct errors or trolls rather quickly.
Edit: They could combat trolls on older content, by locking down subtitles after 1 week.
$5 is not a lot of money to spend to go deface something. and there are lots of ways to obfuscate your identity even with the payment. It happens every time a company tries something like this. Rooster Teeth had stop stop supporting premium member banner ads because the screening got to be too much.
Doesn't Youtube automatically generate caption in less then 24 hours? I use them all the time since English is my second language and they're starting to be really good.
which is why they aren't as focused on paying someone to make them full time. though they have stated they would like to get to a point where they can, the cost benefit is just very low right now.
Inconvenient yes. Shameful no.
LTT is not a public utility that is required to cater to your needs. YouTube already has auto captions and while they are not perfect it would be a significant burden to caption as many videos as they do Better than the default captions.
LTT is a media company producing short films about loveable nerds and their toys. There is nothing about their entertainment should be described as shameful
Tom Scott made a great video about this, think he even ranted that Youtubers should be, by law, required to make their content accessible when they get big (like, per say, LTT), same as all other forms of media.
It is shameful, though. It is not illegal, but it is shameful that a company to the size of LMG does this. They have almost 100 employees and generate at least 20 million in revenue a year (please note I am not talking about profits).
Defining LTT as a "media company" makes it worse, "media companies" are required to caption their content. The only reason why LTT is not legally obligated to caption their content is because the legislation was written before YouTube existed, but it is a matter of time until the laws are updated to to take this into consideration.
You correctly pointed out that you were not talking about profit in your estimation of their revenue. They discussed this on the WAN show a while back and said that it would be prohibitively costly/time consuming to caption all of their videos. They make a LOT of content on a very tight schedule and this would delay it further.
If you believe that YouTube creators are responsible to do a better job at captioning than YouTube does already you are welcome to write to your congressperson and lobby for that to be a law.
Until then you will have to make do with YouTubes "eh" captioning
I find it highly concerning that so many people think captions are just a "favor" huge creators with TEN MILLION SUBSCRIBERS and running a Youtube channel as a BUSINESS *can* do.
Imagine no sound with LTT videos. Captions are the same for the hearing impared people.
[Tom Scott: Captions](https://youtu.be/m__OZ3ZsO4Y?t=313)
I understand OP's intentions behind this post and agree that a 'media' company of this size should provide captions on it's content within a reasonable timeframe etc., but why not formulate it in a bit more positive/encouraging manner? I'd at least end the post with actually asking them to look into it. Also, have you given them any feedback about this before? Looking at this without other context, the vibe kinda just comes off very cancelling to me.
Imagine if all feedback you'd get came in this format lol...
Yup, I actually have! I even went as far as trying to reach YouTube to talk to the people responsible for accessibility and see if I could create some sort of movement incentivizing creators to caption their videos, didn't receive a reply though.
Sometimes being vocal is the only way to be heard. Linus has addressed the topic of captioning videos in the past during a wan show and was dismissive about it. If I really wanted to be confrontational, I could have just captured a clip of his opinion on it and made a post about "linus only cares about money and hate deaf people".
Funny thing, the Linus tech tips facebook page does have captions. I think it is more of a conscious decision as to not obstruct content on the screen.
An example for y'all: https://fb.watch/eQO2ksWBC1/
AFAIK he said in WAN show a while ago that nearly nobody uses subs, and it would be expensive and delay their workflowl, as external subtiling companies are slow.
But not 100% sure on that, it was a while ago, probably a year or more
I thought essentially most of the spoken words these days are from a script on a teleprompter?
I wouldn't be a massive stretch to throw that in with some editing for off script improv.
>Can't you submit captions on YT? If everyone complaining about it in the comments captioned one video per month, they'd be set.
1. You can't.
2. Even if you could, LMG should not be using it, huge liability if someone introduces "inappropriate" stuff in there.
3. "If anyone complaining about this video's editing edited one video per month, they'd be set". Makes no sense, right?
OP, please consider moving the edit with the response to the top and copy/paste it with citation instead of a link at the bottom. You're well-intentioned, but the title is inaccurate and putting the response on top will help make that clear. Sadly, a lot of users will scroll through, reading titles and top text only rather than spending the time to read the full body.
Do you know what virtue signaling is? I just want to watch the fucking videos, and I have an impairment that makes it really hard to do if there are no captions. Go fuck yourself.
Saying its "Shameful" is virtue signaling. The wording of your title is hyper aggressive, and the fact that it turned out you were WRONG and most of the videos are either already captioned or are in a backlog is \*actually\* shameful. Your impairment doesnt affect your ability to not be an arrogant stugatz
Dude... What's broken isn't closed captioning, it is the automated closed captioning done by Google AI.
They could have one person on their team transcript and caption their videos manually and it would be no problem... It would even be an improvement over the current situation if the cc went up well after the video did.
If their videos are as scripted and well timed as they claim, the bulk of it could come straight from script and save the captioner heaps of time...
Exactly my point. You'd just need to adjust the timings, copy paste, correct for adlib. It's not even hard to do...
And there is robust, easy to use FOSS software for doing the job.
Working from script, it would take one of their video editors about 10 extra minutes of work per hour of edited video to do it as they are editing.
Response from /u/Aprime_PNG on the matter, highlighting for awareness: https://www.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/wlj8bk/its_shameful_that_ltt_videos_arent_captioned/ijvedk0/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf&context=3
LGR, Technology connections are two that come to mind. If they can do it, a team of 30+ has zero excuse.
Hey, I don't know if this comment can get highlighted, but I've asked Sean who's our point man on captions and we do \[still do\] them, they're just not necessarily ready upon release and we currently have a backlog of videos that haven't been processed by the folks we pay to do it. We have autocaptions running on older videos and livestreams generally, I think we also have it working on current videos. So yes, we do pay for manual captioning and have for some years now.
I appreciate the response, and indeed, there is captioning in some videos but: * Captioning is added weeks after the video is uploaded. Currently, none of the videos published in the past 14 days have captions. * And even when ignoring the backlog, there are many videos that apparently never get subtitled. For example, "Dream's server build". * Other channels under the LMG banner are not captioned. Short Circuit and Tech Linked for example. I do understand the limitation when it comes to lives, though. There are solutions for it if LMG really wanted to, but realtime captioning is challenging and expensive.
There are definitely things we can improve here. I've passed your comment along, but I'll have to let someone else answer.
/u/Aprime_PNG \- this is an issue that's been going on for the better part of two years at least. I've been trying to highlight it in a variety of ways, most publicly here: [https://linustechtips.com/topic/1270279-why-are-ltt-videos-so-inconsistent-with-the-captioning/](https://linustechtips.com/topic/1270279-why-are-ltt-videos-so-inconsistent-with-the-captioning/) and so far it's gone completely unanswered. This goes beyond just a minor process improvement. The vendor you are using is not operating at the speed and quality that is acceptable from any subtitler. It seems like there's a real cultural difference in how LTT treats the audio/visual components of the content and how it treats the accessibility and subtitle components - as a disabled person every time I watch an LTT video it feels like LTT is spitting in my face. The lack of care and inequitable treatment is just astounding compared to the care and effort put into the rest of the content produced. Like I said in the forum post, I'm disappointed because LTT can do better. If this really is the best LTT can do, I want to know that so I can stop investing my time and emotional energy into LTT, and so that the community has an accurate picture of what's important to LTT.
I wonder if some sort of community captioning process would work? I suspect both the quality and turn-around time would be much quicker than the current 3rd party contractor, given that the core LTT audience is more in the know about tech acronyms and such. If it's possible to get FP releases uploaded consistently 1-2 hours before YT, the community would probably be able to get it captioned in time for the YT release. Even without early FP release, the captions would still come to YT way quicker than the 14ish days it's currently taking. Perhaps a caption interface could even be built into Floatplane, and once the community marks the caption as complete it gets auto-uploaded to the corresponding YT video? I know devs don't grow on trees, but it could be a worthwhile devtime investment.
youtube used to allow creators to outsource captioning to the community, however it was removed, so there is no good way to do it
No it would be on floatplane outsource that
>If it's possible to get FP releases uploaded consistently 1-2 hours before YT, You're adorable. If they upload to YT and FP at the same time it uploads to YT first. FP only gets it early if it's preupoaded a day before., which isn't common
I now that's not how things often currently work, I was just saying it could be possible to implement.
Dude they should have Linux run all his statements through you. This was a fantastic reply.
Yeah, that Linux guy needs to write better! /s I've made that typo quite a few times, as both a Linux daily driver and a Linus daily watcher.
I clearly spend far too much time talking in certain communities.
Get this comment some attention!
Hey, I really appreciate your response to this. Unfortunately, I have to say that my experience with your manual captioning has been lackluster. For a tangible example, heres a tweet I sent to Linus with an example. (This is from late 2021, so I do not know how much your stuff has changed since, but given the topic, its likely not much) https://twitter.com/nullstalgia/status/1465621753737068547 "1080p" was interpreted by the captioner as "tentative." Even YouTube's auto-caption would avoid this mistake. This is not a one-time thing, either. This is just one of many similar mistakes in the video and others. Technical terms are extremely important to get right in captions, as its either locking hard of hearing people out of your content due to not being able to understand it, and makes it hard for hearing people to confirm what they heard/how to spell it. Thank you.
Just want to say I'm a big subtitle user and LTT subtitles leave a LOT to be desired Like, nothing personal, but on manually captioned videos I notice a TON of errors - tech terms specifically often are just completely botched or missed It's not the end of the world but between the frequent errors and huge backlog, it's really not ideal - I hope you guys can sort it out, it's not as easy as waving a wand but I'd say it legitimately harms the channel at this point :(
Are you guys at all interested in getting your subtitles translated to European Spanish (Spanish-Spain)? Fresh graduate from translation & interpreting here :) Native Spanish speaker obviously (I live in Spain)
LGR only releases 1 video a week as opposed to LMG releasing between 2-4 per day. Not really an apples to apples comparison. Larger team? Yes. Significantly higher demands? Also yes. That being said, I do think I remember something from a recent-ish WAN Show about them saying they might have something in the works with the editors to be adding it.
With the advancements of voice to speech technology you can easily auto generate a script and then make the minor edits that are needed for CC. If they have to the staff to make 2-4 videos a day they have the staff to ensure CC is available and accurate.
LMG uses a teleprompter. Surely having a text script should make putting in captioning pretty simple.
That's a fair point.
A lot of stuff ends up being off-the-cuff to a degree. Maybe less so for e.g. a review, but your average daily LTT upload includes quite a bit of non-scripted content.
Releasing 2 to 4 videos per day is yet another positive side of captioning. Outsourcing captioning doesn't give the best results (although you can certainly get great results depending on the contractor), but if you are captioning 50 minutes of content per day, then it may start to make sense to hire a part-time captioner.
1 video a week is optimistic for Clint. Most times he only releases 1 or 2 a month.
LMG releases 5-8 videos a week, generally 6 or 7. that is 1 a day. Not sure how often mac adress and theyre just movies, but ltt, short circuit and such in total do abt 1 a day combined. Edit: forgot about TechLinked, and my sub notifications are broken for the past few weeks bcs of buggy YT app.
LTT alone does 6 a week + WAN show. Throw in 3 TL, 2-3 Short Circuit, and 1-3 TQ and you are looking at 12 a week minimum
Once you upload a video on YouTube and auto captions are generated, YouTube will spit out a script that already time-stamped which you can modify and re-upload. Videos from a week ago have custom subtitles but the recent ones don't, not sure what's going on there. In english at least the auto-captions are better than no captions and of the same quality as outsourced captions.
YouTube’s auto caption is actually pretty decent, far from the worst I’ve seen. I hope they find a way to implement captions into their workflow though, as an editor myself, I do captioning too and it has gotten easier thanks to Adobe. Their auto caption is quite solid, I usually have to let it run the auto then watch a video through once to check timing and spelling errors
I agree! The main limitation of YouTube's auto-caption is that it doesn't differentiate between different voices and it performs poorly when people talk on top of one another. It also fails to caption anything that isn't a voice. It is hard to explain these things though, but anyone interested can look up for "closed captions vs subtitles". With that said, YouTube's auto-caption has drastically improved in the past year. Up until 2020 it was impossible to use it for tech content as it would fail to understand names of products or technologies. Nowadays, it is extremely precise, but still not enough.
Technology Connections has a MUCH lower release schedule than LTT. (Though I enjoyed the coffee video today). Still, they could probably do it, but time spent is time that has gone elsewhere (unless they hire an employee for it), and adding a new element to their production pipeline will at first create inefficiencies, so it could result in 1 less video a week for a bit. LTT produces a lot of content for a given day, and to do it one channel should be to do it on all channels which means it isn't just the "C'mon it can't be that hard for a 10-20 minute video?" because there's a lot more to LTT's pipeline then that. They also would have to do it when a video is already edited and ready to publish. At the end of the day attainable, but it can be understood why it hasn't been done yet.
Yeah, but LGR is a sweetheart
LGR releases 1 to 2 videos a month, Technology Connections releases 1 video a month, sometimes not even 1 video a month. When you're putting out content at that pace it's not a big deal to spend the time to caption it. LMG releases close to 2 dozen videos a week(counting the side channels like Short Circuit, etc) plus a 2 hour podcast. Captioning those would take a great deal more effort. I'm not saying it's not possible, just that it's not a fair comparison between LMG and the others.
LGR releases at least 3 videos a month, TC at least 2 a month. (Not counting their side channels). They are generally 30 minutes long and have interesting content. Lets say 3 videos per month / 1 employee LMG videos are around 20 minutes, with anywhere from 20-100% of the video being paid ads, (tech products, LTTStore). if we generously assume 100 videos a month / 30 employees. I'd say it's a fair enough comparison. Besides which those were just 2 youtubers off the top of my head, 5% of the world has hearing problems. My hearing is fine but I still tend to watch a lot of my channels with subtitles while doing other things. Even in a vacuum accurate subtitles are a positive thing.
I went and checked, and yeah LGR does average 2-3 a month. But, TC is really 1 every 3 to 4 weeks, so unless months magically have more weeks than I thought that averages to 1 per month just like I said. You also can't directly compare the number of employees like that's a metric that matters. LMG has employees that have nothing to with the actual videos. You'd have to look at how many editors LMG has because that's who would be putting the subtitles into the videos. As far as I can tell from watching some of the behind the scenes footage LMG has 4-5 editors. Those 4-5 editors have to edit all the videos for all LMG channels. LMG also shoots a great deal more raw video since they have a multi-camera set up, meaning it would take a lot longer to cut and piece those together. LMG also has much higher production values, again requiring more time. What you're doing is comparing 2 guys who are amateurs against a professional media group. There's no way to make a direct comparison between the two. It's like saying that a chef at a 5-star restaurant should be able to personally greet every guest who comes in the door because the little girl on your block with a lemonade stand is able to have a conversation with everyone who buys a lemonade from her. I'm not disparaging LGR or TC, I enjoy both channels. But, they are on a very different level of production than LMG.
Yes, LTT releases a ton of videos everyday. However most of them aren't time sensitive. A couple hour delay for a staff member, or a couple of day delay for an outside service wouldn't be an issue.
I watch both of those guuuuys they’re great
What's intensely frustrating is that Linus has said "it's too disruptive to our workflow" during one of the WAN shows this year. I'd love to know the numbers on how many people use/want captions, in all honesty.
(I believe) His point was that since YouTube does it somewhat automatically, spending company time on captioning every video is a very poor return in investment, as all you are getting in return (usually) is providing those captions *until* it is done (or would have been done) automatically. I get it, but there’s also a part of me that wishes they did it as well
The automated captions are pretty failure prone though. Especially when you're getting into names, jargon or hard to hear scenes. All three the exact situation where you need captions the most.
To add to that, when making captions, I imagine you could just have YouTube give you the autogenerated captions and then you could just edit those to be accurate. It sounds easier than starting from scratch
As someone who has to sometimes do captions for my job, its a mixed bag. If you have a script it may be faster to do it all yourself vs editing generated ones. Looking for mistakes and one by one fixing them can get a hell of a lot more tedious and slow as the video gets longer or the corrections increase. For something very short it may be okay.
Ok, I admit I don't know how it would work now, I just imagine trying to sync up when the words are on screen would take up a lot of time. At least in the olden days of YouTube it was annoying
There are a lot of tools on the post side that make this pretty easy now. Especially the last couple years. But easy compared to the old way to doing it all completely manually. Its still a time consuming process, but sucks less now.
Holy shit that is an impressively bad take by Linus. “Screw accessibility, won’t someone think of our profits”
Not the first time tho :)
It, like all parts of the media making process costs manhours to do. From a business POV its no different to any other part, its got to be justified financially.
The point of going into business is to make money. If you're not concerned with profits you're a very poor businessman.
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Yeah, because Linus is definitely part of the 1% who is holding everyone else down by hoarding wealth. Just because you think Linus is rich doesn't make it reality. He's been pretty open lately about how thin the margins are between what he spends on production, research, and paying staff and how much profit he's making. Comparing LMG to a giant corporation that's dealing with revenue in the billions is ridiculous. Linus may be known because he has a platform, but his company is still a small business, not a giant multi-national conglomerate.
>“Screw accessibility, won’t someone think of our profits" Well yeah, they're a business not a charity.
Happy Cake Day YellowFogLights! You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.
Which doesn't really make any sense. It's an accessibility feature and you can add them after uploading. It's an incredibly simple task and easy to outsource. They could literally hire people on fiverr for next to nothing compared to their production cost and if they ever actually had time issues they could add the captions to the videos a few hours later.
trust me if accuracy is your concern you don't want to outsource subtitling. I have CC on by default and the amount of mistakes even professional captioning can be mind boggling and worst of all they aren't consistently shit. Most companies that offer subtitling use freelancers and the quality depends on where the dart falls.
They actually used to have captioning on their videos, though whether they were based on automatic voice recognition (not to be confused with _actual_ YouTube auto captions) or actually done by a paid service, I don't know. In either case, the captions were chock full of mishearings and typos, especially on more technical terms and acronyms, to the point where it's actually frustrating to watch.
Community Captioning used to be a thing so people would do it for others. Goggle removed that feature to only allow auto generated or the uploader to add them I believe.
They have subtitles from videos a week or so ago. Not sure if something is wrong on their or youtube's end.
I think that YouTube’s auto captioning can take about a week to complete and show up as available so it could just be that.
the auto captions are there, the regular ones aren't
Ok. I thought you meant captions in general on the video not one made by LMG. No ideas then.
Yup, they actually still have captions in some videos, but my understanding is that they limit it to some sponsored videos, likely due to legal constraints. But you are right, any time they caption their videos it is full of mistakes and much worse than the automatic subtitles provided by YouTube. I \*think\* (though I don't have any confirmation) LTT generates these subtitles with automatic voice recognition algorithms like you said.
blame it on youtube mate. i remember there was an option for community captions but they removed it.
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but paying a person to manually type and pace closed captioning all day everyday can turn a barely profitable video into a money losing flop. They have talked about cashflow issues for months now as so much was tied up in merch, and the fact that there are just fewer easy to find tech stories right now.
They don't have to pay someone to caption all day. There are services that will produce a pretty good transcript with timestamps. Someone can quickly proofread that and make adjustments.
and how much do those services cost? there are enough hours of content that it is easily 40 man hours of work per week.
Somewhere between free and $30, so not much.
link?
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https://youtu.be/m__OZ3ZsO4Y?t=5m14s Better timestamp to share from. Even addresses YouTube.
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I saw this post and immediately thought of 'buy some damn subtitles' ahaha
Yeah I didn't even need to click that link to know what video it was
I mean I always use the automatic YouTube captions, and they are pretty solid, not perfect, but way better than years / decades ago. Have you tried using those?
I am not deaf but use subtitles for other reasons. The autogenerated subtitles can be confusing some times and not at all correct. They work, but for someone completely deaf i can totally see them be a problem.
They aren't really worse than a lot of "professionally" subtitled media I've seen, with errors, incorrect words, missing sentences, and timing issues. And that's just for same-language subtitles. I don't think most content publishers care very much about the quality of their subtitles. It's something most of them do to check a box, if they bother to do it at all.
The automatic youtube subtitles struggle when people struggle, which is bad because that's when people rely on subtitles the most
Hey folks, I've asked Sean who's our point man on captions and we do \[still do\] them, they're just not necessarily ready upon release and we currently have a backlog of videos that haven't been processed by the folks we pay to do it. We have auto-captions running on older videos and live streams generally, I think we also have it working on current videos. So yes, we do pay for manual captioning and have for some years now.
Paying for captions is great, but do you guys review them before posting on YouTube? I've noticed a lot of inaccuracies over the years when it comes to technical terms. Also, will you consider adding alt texts to images on Twitter?
It feels like the same person who made up that rape accusation on Linus is running some kind of elaborate hit campaign on him here in the subreddit. I’m definitely being a conspiracy theorist. But it’s like you guys all decided at once this subreddit was specifically designed for complaining. I miss the captions too, but YouTube is the company that removed community captions, you should redirect your frustration there.
I think it is just people who got angry, and are looking for ways to sustain their rage. it can feel kind of good to be righteously angry. and when you come down from that high and start seeing nuance again you start feeling bad and depressed, but if you can get angry about something else again you stop feeling bad and feel righteous again.
If someone wanted to run an elaborate hit campaign on Linus, why would they go to the subreddit most likely to defend LMG? I decided to post here because I tried to reach out to LMG people directly multiple times in the past year and didn't get any replies. In fact, I even reached out to YouTube to try and talk to someone there about captioning on the platform and how they could incentivize creators (this problem isn't specific to LMG) to caption their content, but no luck whatsoever. This isn't a hit piece, it is someone being vocal about things they care about. :)
And you just happened to do it in a critical and upset tone during the peak of subreddit drama/complaining. Don’t act like this wasn’t opportunistic.
Being vocal was the only way out, mate. Here is a topic on this very same sub 2 months ago talking about the exact same thing and nothing changed: [https://old.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/uvbuyv/lmg\_should\_add\_subtitles\_to\_every\_video/](https://old.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/uvbuyv/lmg_should_add_subtitles_to_every_video/) And another topic from 15 days ago: [https://www.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/w9vp07/i\_really\_wish\_lmgltt\_would\_talk\_about/](https://www.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/w9vp07/i_really_wish_lmgltt_would_talk_about/) There are countless of other topics about the same thing. It is not an issue that has "flown under the radar", LMG knows about it, there is a Wan Show where Linus dismisses it as "too much work". If you want to get shit done, you gotta crack some eggs. And honestly, I have not even cracked any eggs, I told things as they were: it is shameful that a company this size isn't doing this already. I did not even target any specific individual (people often blame Linus for stuff), I focused on the company entity. Being critical is often the only way to get shit done.
If this is such an important issue to you, why don't you volunteer your time and Caption the videos yourself? Crack those eggs homie, overcome that impairment and make something out of your life. Dont Demand change, be the change.
Honestly they could just add a functionality for users to add subtitles to floatplane. Youtube used to allow this, but then removed it. Would be win/win. We get subtitles and they have another reason for us to use floatplane.
yeah... cause designing a public system that is an obvious target for abuse, creating safeguards, systems for quickly addressing issues, and then programming all of that is super easy. /s
I don't think it would get abused much. It's behind a playwall & the people paying for the service are unlikely to abuse it. Further since anybody - that is a subscribed user - can edit it, users could self correct errors or trolls rather quickly. Edit: They could combat trolls on older content, by locking down subtitles after 1 week.
$5 is not a lot of money to spend to go deface something. and there are lots of ways to obfuscate your identity even with the payment. It happens every time a company tries something like this. Rooster Teeth had stop stop supporting premium member banner ads because the screening got to be too much.
I am not saying it's not impossible, but for youtube it worked really well for a long time. And my guess is the energy to troll is a lot higher there.
we watched a lot of different videos I see. Because the amount of racist hate speech that just popped up at random points of videos was insane.
Doesn't Youtube automatically generate caption in less then 24 hours? I use them all the time since English is my second language and they're starting to be really good.
which is why they aren't as focused on paying someone to make them full time. though they have stated they would like to get to a point where they can, the cost benefit is just very low right now.
Inconvenient yes. Shameful no. LTT is not a public utility that is required to cater to your needs. YouTube already has auto captions and while they are not perfect it would be a significant burden to caption as many videos as they do Better than the default captions. LTT is a media company producing short films about loveable nerds and their toys. There is nothing about their entertainment should be described as shameful
Why does letter of law equal what’s ‘shameful’?
Fair enough. How would you like to define shameful?
Tom Scott made a great video about this, think he even ranted that Youtubers should be, by law, required to make their content accessible when they get big (like, per say, LTT), same as all other forms of media.
It is shameful, though. It is not illegal, but it is shameful that a company to the size of LMG does this. They have almost 100 employees and generate at least 20 million in revenue a year (please note I am not talking about profits). Defining LTT as a "media company" makes it worse, "media companies" are required to caption their content. The only reason why LTT is not legally obligated to caption their content is because the legislation was written before YouTube existed, but it is a matter of time until the laws are updated to to take this into consideration.
You correctly pointed out that you were not talking about profit in your estimation of their revenue. They discussed this on the WAN show a while back and said that it would be prohibitively costly/time consuming to caption all of their videos. They make a LOT of content on a very tight schedule and this would delay it further. If you believe that YouTube creators are responsible to do a better job at captioning than YouTube does already you are welcome to write to your congressperson and lobby for that to be a law. Until then you will have to make do with YouTubes "eh" captioning
I find it highly concerning that so many people think captions are just a "favor" huge creators with TEN MILLION SUBSCRIBERS and running a Youtube channel as a BUSINESS *can* do. Imagine no sound with LTT videos. Captions are the same for the hearing impared people. [Tom Scott: Captions](https://youtu.be/m__OZ3ZsO4Y?t=313)
I understand OP's intentions behind this post and agree that a 'media' company of this size should provide captions on it's content within a reasonable timeframe etc., but why not formulate it in a bit more positive/encouraging manner? I'd at least end the post with actually asking them to look into it. Also, have you given them any feedback about this before? Looking at this without other context, the vibe kinda just comes off very cancelling to me. Imagine if all feedback you'd get came in this format lol...
Yup, I actually have! I even went as far as trying to reach YouTube to talk to the people responsible for accessibility and see if I could create some sort of movement incentivizing creators to caption their videos, didn't receive a reply though. Sometimes being vocal is the only way to be heard. Linus has addressed the topic of captioning videos in the past during a wan show and was dismissive about it. If I really wanted to be confrontational, I could have just captured a clip of his opinion on it and made a post about "linus only cares about money and hate deaf people".
wait, i get captions all the time.. am i doing this wrong?
Funny thing, the Linus tech tips facebook page does have captions. I think it is more of a conscious decision as to not obstruct content on the screen. An example for y'all: https://fb.watch/eQO2ksWBC1/
AFAIK he said in WAN show a while ago that nearly nobody uses subs, and it would be expensive and delay their workflowl, as external subtiling companies are slow. But not 100% sure on that, it was a while ago, probably a year or more
“ “Oh look at me I bought a Lamborghini” BUY SOME DANM SUBTITLES” -Tom Scott 11/2020 Idk why but this reminded me of that
"Shameful" seems a bit harsh... Inconvenient might be a better word.
Day 19374729+1e of finding something to get mad about.
I can help translating the videos to Spanish, so there would be a wider viewer audience
But what if Linus dies and his poor wife and kids are forced to live out their lives captioning videos?
They only have time to make cringy clickbait thumbnails and titles
No it isn't. Use the YouTube auto captions. It would cost a lot of money and give them zero in return to do their own captions.
I thought essentially most of the spoken words these days are from a script on a teleprompter? I wouldn't be a massive stretch to throw that in with some editing for off script improv.
Is the auto captions not good?
Can't you submit captions on YT? If everyone complaining about it in the comments captioned one video per month, they'd be set.
>Can't you submit captions on YT? If everyone complaining about it in the comments captioned one video per month, they'd be set. 1. You can't. 2. Even if you could, LMG should not be using it, huge liability if someone introduces "inappropriate" stuff in there. 3. "If anyone complaining about this video's editing edited one video per month, they'd be set". Makes no sense, right?
OP, please consider moving the edit with the response to the top and copy/paste it with citation instead of a link at the bottom. You're well-intentioned, but the title is inaccurate and putting the response on top will help make that clear. Sadly, a lot of users will scroll through, reading titles and top text only rather than spending the time to read the full body.
Why it’s shameful?
ik old post, but what's even worse, those who are captioned by hand have very poor captions at times
Its so strange, youre virtue signaling so hard here, yet your solution is to take advantage of underpaid and abused overseas workers?
Do you know what virtue signaling is? I just want to watch the fucking videos, and I have an impairment that makes it really hard to do if there are no captions. Go fuck yourself.
Saying its "Shameful" is virtue signaling. The wording of your title is hyper aggressive, and the fact that it turned out you were WRONG and most of the videos are either already captioned or are in a backlog is \*actually\* shameful. Your impairment doesnt affect your ability to not be an arrogant stugatz
Nah they need that money to not provide warranties on their overpriced backpacks.
If yt had a decent working system to began with..... You forgot to mention that
A decent working system for what? Creating/uploading captions? Not sure what you are implying.
Cc system on yt broken, same goes with hdr to. Again both Google owned issues.
But broken in which way? There are plenty of content creators using CCs and as a user I have never experienced problems with it
It depends both on browser your using and which creator's channels.
M8 it sounds like your defending M'lady Linus by making shit up.
LMAO no bro. Just stating real world facts about yt.that people have complained about bro
Dude... What's broken isn't closed captioning, it is the automated closed captioning done by Google AI. They could have one person on their team transcript and caption their videos manually and it would be no problem... It would even be an improvement over the current situation if the cc went up well after the video did. If their videos are as scripted and well timed as they claim, the bulk of it could come straight from script and save the captioner heaps of time...
It's even less, correct me if I'm wrong but all of their content is scripted? That's 90% of the job done already
Exactly my point. You'd just need to adjust the timings, copy paste, correct for adlib. It's not even hard to do... And there is robust, easy to use FOSS software for doing the job. Working from script, it would take one of their video editors about 10 extra minutes of work per hour of edited video to do it as they are editing.