Yeah... I toyed with the auto-captioning a while back, and it was like watching a really bad bootleg DVD.
I'm tied about what my favorite mistranscription is. In one University of California video, "we're doing rock climbing as well as table tennis" was captioned as "for doing what I mean as well as democrats". But that's nothing compared to what happened to the alphabet song.
These bad captions are particularly frustrating because the original sources were already captioned! Since the 1980s all network PBS (US public television) has been captioned; the same has been true for all HBO (paid US cable network) productions since 1995.
This. This is what gets me the most, not just about YouTube but about online content in general.
I can understand when something isn't captioned because it's a web original thing, but when it's something that's already been captioned for TV? There are ways to rip it and convert it for online use. I've done this from DVD recordings using some open-source tools. And WGBH, the PBS station in Boston, invented one of the ripping tools for caption data, so PBS in particular has no excuse.
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I'm tied about what my favorite mistranscription is. In one University of California video, "we're doing rock climbing as well as table tennis" was captioned as "for doing what I mean as well as democrats". But that's nothing compared to what happened to the alphabet song.
This. This is what gets me the most, not just about YouTube but about online content in general.
I can understand when something isn't captioned because it's a web original thing, but when it's something that's already been captioned for TV? There are ways to rip it and convert it for online use. I've done this from DVD recordings using some open-source tools. And WGBH, the PBS station in Boston, invented one of the ripping tools for caption data, so PBS in particular has no excuse.