The YouTube Captioner’s Toolkit

Introduction

YouTube recently retired their Community Contributions feature which allowed users to provide captions or subtitles for other channels. If you are unfamiliar with this feature and why it was retired check out our History of YouTube CC’s series.

This page lists general information and alternative tools for caption authors and translators to be able to continue their captioning.

Is it possible to submit/accept new community contributions?

No, not anymore. It was possible to submit/accept community contributions until around October 8 PM (GMT), when the old captions editor shut down for good. For a more detailed explanation see this post.

If you need a substitute, have a look at some alternatives for community contributions.

The Save Community Contributions (SCC) Project

Data Horde itself is conducting a project to rescue unpublished captions and caption authors for published captions. We aim to later share these with community captioning revival projects. You can read more about the Save Community Contributions here.

Current Status: The collection is now available on the Internet Archive with a built-in search feature to make your life easier! Read more here.

Community Captioning Alternatives

Here are a few alternatives to YouTube’s community captioning:

YouTubexternalCC, a project where users can add and share new community captions. These external captions are visible to everyone on the website, but not on YouTube. Allows for multiple submissions even within the same language.

Captionfy, a project where users can add and share new community captions. While not as versatile in rendering captions as its competitors, Captionfy comes with unique feature of its own.
These include a web-editor, an interface for requesting captions for a video, and a like/dislike system for ranking the quality of captions.

YouCap, a project where users can add/review new community captions. Comes with a browser extension for viewers to seamlessly enable external captions while browsing YouTube. Currently limited to captioning in English, Spanish and French.

NekoCap, is a plugin which allows people to share/view captions. NekoCap supports high-stylized formats such as .ssa and .ass (see image below), and also comes with a like/dislike system for ranking the quality of captions.

NekoCap rendering stylized community captions for Railgun S OP/Opening「Sister noise」

Amara, caption and subtitle editor. You can use Amara to caption any video you like, either via YouTube link or video upload. Amara is split into two: a public workspace shared between all accounts and private workspaces (free for personal use, paid for multiple users).

If you author captions on Amara you will be keeping these captions for yourself unless you share them on the public workspace. But these only show up on Amara (or API) but will not show up on YouTube. You will have to find a way to send them to the owner of the actual video.

This RSA Animate video has English captions available on Amara’s Public Workspace but not on the actual YouTube video

NOTE: Upon removing community contributions, YouTube gave eligible channels a year-long subscription for Amara’s team features, which allow people to provide captions/translations on a common workspace run by a YouTube channel owner. So be on the lookout for any channels you watch who might be looking for Amara translators.

YouTube Subtitler is the oldest surviving community captioning alternative. It was created internally at Google, circa 2008. It has basic features for transcribing and syncing subtitles. It’s included on this list for historical purposes (inactive since around 2015).

Non-Community Captioning Alternatives

These are nice services, but you will have to find a way to share your captions with other people! “Non-community” captioning:

Subtitles for YouTube, a Chrome extension for overlaying your own subtitles/caption files on YouTube videos. Comes with a neat search feature which can be used to search for subtitles on Amara’s Public Workspace and OpenSubtitles.org.

Using the Subtitles for YouTube extension for loading lyrics from Amara for Waiting For The End (Official Video) – Linkin Park, a video missing captions on YouTube.

https://hierogly.ph can produce transcripts from auto-generated captions by removing timestamps. It’s a useful tool if you just need the transcript of a video to remember what is being said. For example as slide notes when giving a presentation. Or perhaps if you want to text someone what is being said in a video. Essentially, it’s useful whenever the content of a speech is more important than the timing in a video.

Using hierogly.ph to generate a transcript on What If Earth got Kicked Out of the Solar System? Rogue Earth by Kurzgesagt.

NoMoreCraptions.com is a caption editor specifically designed with YouTube in mind. It extracts automatically generated captions directly from YouTube and allows you to correct any typos. Much like Amara though, you will have to send the captions to the video owner yourself. Also be warned, NoMoreCraptions has no save feature, so you should download your captions as soon as you are done.

(Note: the NoMoreCraptions.com domain is currently down and needs to be renewed, the site is not accessible at this time)