Why have subtitles for your videos?
- According to WHO about half a billion people have disability hearing loss (about 1 person in 16).
- Many people can’t or don’t turn on audio (e.g. 85% of facebook videos are watched on mute).
- Research has shown many people prefer to watch videos with subtitles switched on.
- Not everyone speaks your language (English 25%, Chinese 20%, Spanish 10%, Arabic 5%).
- Viewers are more engaged. Research has shown that on average non-subtitled videos were watched to 66% completion while for those with subtitles it was 90%.
- Subtitled videos improve your social media ranking.
Why don’t more people create subtitles for their videos? Mainly because it is tedious, which is why I have created a SubRip Subtitle Generator to simplify it somewhat. Subtitles can be burned into the video using several software applications, including shotcut. But they don’t have to be hard-coded in this way: SubRip (.srt) subtitle files can be included in AVI, MP4, MKV etc containers and various video players can use these.
The generator is an HTML file that you download and use to create the SubRip text that can be copy-pasted into a simple text editor (like Notepad++) and saved as a “.srt” file that you can upload to video platforms like YouTube and Vimeo, or can include in the video file container itself (Google it). You can even feed the SubRip text into Google translate and instantly get new SubRip text for storing in a French, German, Japanese … version of the subtitles.
If you want to try it go to here: http://elusien.co.uk/shotcut/SRT/ and let me have any comments on improvements.