MediaSpace: Captions

Captions in MediaSpace

Providing accurate captions in MediaSpace helps make your videos accessible, searchable, and easy to use. MediaSpace will automatically add machine-generated captions to uploaded videos hosted in MediaSpace. You can also request machine captions for free for videos imported from other platforms such as YouTube. 

Upload a video and automatically generate captions

1. Log in to your MediaSpace account
   • Open your web browser and log into my.mines.edu with your Mines credentials.
   • Click on the MediaSpace tile to log in.
   • You can also log in to MediaSpace directly at mediaspace.mines.edu.
     
2. Upload your video
   • Click on + Create at the top right corner and select Upload, Express Capture, or Capture.
     
3. Captions will be automatically created
   • By default, MediaSpace will attempt to create English captions. If you need a different language, please contact IT.
   • It may take up to 30 minutes plus the length of the video for automated captions to be generated. If it has been several hours and captions still haven't been generated, please contact IT to request help with MediaSpace.
   • Machine-generated captions are not accurate enough to meet caption-related accommodations. If you need professionally generated captions to meet a student accommodation, contact Disability Support Services. 

Manually generate machine captions

If you are adding a video from YouTube or other external source, you can manually request machine captions.

1. Click on the profile icon in the upper right and select My Media to access the list of your videos.
2. Check the box next to the video(s) that needs captions.
3. On the right side, select the Actions drop-down menu and choose + Caption & Enrich. A new page will load.
   
   1. Set Service to Machine.
   2. Set Source Media Language to English. If you need a different language, please contact IT.
   3. Set Feature to Captions. 
      
4. Click Submit. The system will start processing the captions. 
   1. You can check the status of your captions on each video page by selecting Actions > Caption and Enrich. The status will display under Existing Requests.
5. When the captions are ready, they will automatically be added to the video.

Enable captions in the video player

1. When captions are available, a CC button will appear in the video player toolbar that can be used to toggle captions on or off.
   
2. You can also select a caption file or turn captions off by clicking the cog icon on the player toolbar.
   1. Machine-generated captions will be listed as English [auto-generated].
   2. Professionally created captions will be listed under the language of the captions, for example English.
      
      • These captions have a higher degree of accuracy than machine-generated captions because they have been manually corrected and have important contextual information such as sound effects and speaker tags. Captions with at least 99% accuracy are required to meet accessibility standards. 

Edit captions

1. To edit captions, navigate to the video page and select Actions > Edit.
2. Select the Captions tab.
3. Click the Edit Captions button. This will open the Closed Captions Editor. 
   1. For more detailed instructions on using the Caption Editor, please follow this guide.
   2. When you are finished with your edits, click Save and confirm.
4. To return to the video page, click Back.

Upload caption files

If you already have a caption file, you can upload it to a video. MediaSpace can display multiple caption files in different languages. 

1. Navigate to the video and select Actions > Edit.
2. Select the Captions tab.
3. Click Upload captions file. Files must be in one of these formats: SRT, VTT (WebVTT), DXFP, or SCC. 
   
   • Click Browse to choose a file from your computer
   • Select the language of the caption file.
   • Set an accuracy percentage.
     • If you are using manually created captions from a vendor, select 99%. Most captioning vendors guarantee this accuracy rate.
     • If you aren't sure about the accuracy, leave this field blank by selecting Select Accuracy.
     • Leave the label field blank to use the language name as the caption file label in the player.
   • Click Save.
4. ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Refresh the video page to see the newly uploaded caption file. Caption files can be accessed in the cog settings icon in the player.