[Floatplane Suggestion] - Community Captioning for FloatPlane

[Issa Aboudi]

Apologies if this is not the correct place for this post - I didn't see a Floatplane subforum.

I'm proposing Floatplane enact a feature like Youtubes old Community Captions where members of the community could step up and transcribe the videos and translate to different languages.

 

Obviously, this would be entirely voluntary. Since Floatplane is comprised of more dedicated and invested fans, it is feasible that there would be individuals who would be willing to contribute to captioning videos. I would expect that there be a way for collaboration between multiple users - especially for longer form content like WAN show - where people contribute for specific time stamps and it gets spliced together into one file. Also some safeguards against trolling would be nice - edit logs and whatnot.

 

Also, if done in a way where the vtt file can be exported and added to YouTube, this would improve captions on YouTube videos across the board.

 

The reason I'm proposing this is because as a Deaf individual who wants to further support the team, I really can't access Floatplane until auto captioning is added and Linus has said that for the foreseeable future, they will not invest in a captioning company to hand caption their videos. Which is fair enough - I think the auto captions on youtube is okay, but Community captions was amazing and Youtube is dumb for removing it. I'd love to see it make a comeback on something like Floatplane.

 

BTW as for trolling - people purposefully putting memes and jokes in the subtitles rather than captioning what was said - in the old days of youtube, there were lots jokes and stuff in addition to the captioning that overall improved the experience of videos for those watching (they were marked in []'s) and if they are disruptive or not relevant, others in the community would likely keep them in check.

 

Thoughts?