As a devotee of RSS, the rise of newsletters continues to mystify me. But I’ve adapted. Today, there are some newsletters I enjoy, but I’ve never liked inbox delivery. So this is the best thing I learned about this week: kill-the-newsletter.com 📖

I'm no video expert. Yet I often find myself encoding, editing, and otherwise manipulating video for the web. Recently, I completed a video project that involved converting a DVD of a 40-minute presentation into a movie that could be viewed on a web page, as a whole or in chapters. The final product had to be captioned.

Converting the DVD into video for the web was easy. I used Handbrake to rip the DVD into MP4 format. Editing was equally easy. I used iMovie to add title screens and transitions, and to break the movie up into chapters. Adding the captioning, however, was tricky.

Why bother with captioning? Here are some good reasons: so that those who are deaf or hard of hearing can enjoy the video, so the text is indexed by search engines, and to aid those for whom English is a second language. And here’s another: the Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2010.

If captioning is important, then why isn't it a mainstream practice? I'm not qualified to answer that question, but my guess is that it's in part due to the fact that captioning is time-consuming and difficult. For instance: with external captioning (where captions are contained in an external file and sync with the video), there are multiple formats and a lack of clear standards. And for embedded captioning (where captions are simply typed in an editor and then exported with the movie), it's just plain tedious work.

For my recent video project, I considered three captioning options:

1. Embed the captions. The first option is to place the captions directly into the movie itself using a tool such as Final Cut Pro,  iMovie, or  Adobe Premiere.  I have Final Cut Pro, but I tend to use iMovie since most of the video work I do is short and simple. It’s the easiest tool for the job and the results look good. Here’s the thing about iMovie: while there are dozens of title/text effect options, none are designed for captioning (which is surprising given Apple's robust accessability options for the OS). Despite this shortcoming, I’ve discovered that I can 'fake' captions by adding lower thirds to each segment of video. Making a default lower third overlay in iMovie into something that resembles a caption is a matter of changing font sizes. You can see an example of this in a recent video podcast I produced. This works, but it isn't a practical solution for a long movie. In truth, it's really not an ideal solution for any length movie because the captions are permanently embedded in the video. Screen readers and search engines can't see this text. People can’t choose to turn the captions on/off. So I didn't choose this option for my project.
2. Dump the text on the page. A second option is to dump the captioning for a video on a page, underneath the video as HTML text. This may technically meets accessibility requirements, but it’s a lousy solution. The text is unassociated with the video. One can read the text or watch the video. It's not feasible to do both at the same time. Nix.
3. Create an external caption file. This last choice is the best solution: create an external caption file that will appear in sync with the video. Captioning is then matched up with the video, it's readable by screen readers, and it's good for search engines. It can also be turned on or off at the user's discretion.

So how do you create and deploy and external caption file? If you simply wish to place a video on Youtube, it's easy. Once you upload your video to the free service, Youtube offers free auto-generated machine transcription. While you'll find that video speech-to-text accuracy is hit-and-miss (more miss in my experience), the important part is that Google generates  time codes that precisely match the the audio in the video. So once you download the caption file from Youtube, it's a simply a matter of manually correcting the text so that what appears in the caption will match what is actually being said in the video.

If you don't want to (or can't because of workplace policy) solely use Youtube to present your video, it's still a very useful tool. How? If you are embedding captions in a video using an editor such as iMovie, YouTube will do half of the work for you by delivering a fair approximation of a transcript. If you want to use an external caption file elsewhere with a different video player, you can still use this Google-generated file. You just need to convert it into the right format.

Here’s the process I used to generate a caption file for my video project:

• I began by uploading the video to my YouTube channel.
• I then requested that YouTube auto-generate a Subviewer caption file for this movie (Be patient. It may take hours to get this file back from Google because you'll be in a queue with tons of other people).
• I then downloaded this file and opened it up in text editor. 
• The next step is tedious, but necessary: cleaning up the machine-generated text. I opened my movie in a QuickTime player window and, as it played, edited my caption text to correct errors and typos. It's not too bad if you toogle between a text editor and QuickTime using Cmd-Tab.
• Once I had my cleaned-up Subviewer text file, I copied and pasted it it into a free online converter to generate into the appropriate format. In my case, I generated a DFXP file for use with a Flash player. Here are three conversion tool options:
  
  • 3PlayMedia Caption Format Converter. This converter lets you convert from SRT or from SBV to  DFXP, SMI or SAMI (Windows Media), CPT.XML (Flash Captionate XML), QT (Quicktime), and STL (Spruce Subtitle File).
  • Subtitle Horse. A free online caption editor. Exports DFXP, SRT, and Adobe Encore files.
  • Subviewer to DFXP. This free online tool from Ohio State University converts a YouTube .SBV file into DFXP, Subrip, or QT (QuickTime caption) files. I used this tool for my project.

What’s the appropriate format?

• YouTube: Subviewer (.SBV) 
• iTunes, iOS: Scenarist Closed Caption (.SCC) 
• Flash: DFXP, Timed Text Markup Language, the W3C recommendation. These are plain ol’ XML files.  You could also use the SubRip (.SRT) file format for Flash.
• HTML5:  See this post.

If you're not using a hosted service like YouTube or Vimeo (which, incidentally, does not support external captions), you'll of course have to decide how to present the video on your site. There are many options. You can roll your own player with external captions using Adobe Flash. You can use off-the-shelf players that support captioning such as Flowplayer and JW Player — these two commercial products offer very easy setup and they offer HTML5 video players with Flash fallback. Another option: you might try HTML5 with experimental captioning support (note that Safari 5 now supports captioning with the HTML5 video tag). As I said, there are options. The video player discussion is beyond the scope of this post (and I don’t want to go down the HTML5 vs. Flash rabbit hole!).

My main goal here is to point out that Google's machine transcription is good for more than just hosting a captioned video on Youtube. It's trivial to convert this caption file into a variety of formats. The key point is that you don't have to manually add time codes for your video. This critical step is done for you.

Yet even with this handy Google tool, generating caption files (and getting them to work with video players) remains an unwieldy task. We clearly need better tools and standards to help bring video captioning into the mainstream.

P.S. While researching this post, I came across two low-cost tools that look like solid options to create iOS and iTunes movies with captions. Both are from a company called bitfield. The first is called Submerge. This tool makes it very easy to embed (hard-code) subtitles in a movie and will import all the popular external captioning formats. The second is called iSubtitle. This tool will ‘soft-code’ subtitle tracks so you can add multiple files (languages) and easily add metadata to your movie.

The best online file synching service is now out of Beta. Dropbox 1.0 offers selective folder synchronization (hooray!), an easier installation process, improved performance, and a slew of bug fixes.  If you're not on Dropbox, why not? The first 250MB of storage space is free. And if you get new people to sign up to the service, you get an additional 250MB of free space per person. Speaking of which, if you're new to Dropbox ... why not use this referral link to sign up. He he.

Huffduffer. It's a creation of web developer Jeremy Keith, who says he originally invented this tool for himself to fill a simple need.

Like many online tools with staying power, 'filling a simple need' is often the first litmus test for success. The second is filling a simple need well. And this site does the job very well. Huffduffer is an easy-to-use, elegant, friendly way to create your own personal podcast stream from found audio on the web. The part that makes Huffduffer so useful is RSS feed creation. It's easy to bookmark audio, but not so easy to create an iTunes-compatible RSS feed. I think of it this way: Huffduffer is to audio what Instapaper is to text.

I must admit, though, that I have only just started using this tool as intended. So far, I've primarily been using it as a discovery tool to find audio content I otherwise would not have known existed by subscribing to Huffduffer's 'Popular' feed. As you may surmise, this feed delivers a steady stream of what other people are 'Huffduffing.' The downside to this stream is that there are often many duplicate posts, so you'll find yourself often deleting entries that you've seen before. The upside is that the content is usually interesting and there's plenty of new content every day. For my long daily train commute, this feed is most welcome.

You'll find that much of the 'popular content' tends to be in the vein of tech, design, web design/development, science fiction, speculative science, and hard science. This surely says a lot about the core users of the site. And this makes sense given who created it: I surmise that site usage has spread mainly by word-of-mouth and via conferences. I, for instance, discovered it a web design conference where Jeremy Keith was speaking. So if you are particularly interested in this type of content, you'll get a lot out of this feed. As a secondary benefit, the popular feed has helped me find many a new podcast to subscribe to via iTunes. Now I need to start huffduffing some of my own 'found audio.' 

Here are a few recent items from the 'popular' feed that I really enjoyed:

Conversation with William Gibson — A discussion with William Gibson about where we are headed in the post-internet age.

Arthur C. Clarke, Alvin Toffler, Margaret Mead —  A talk recorded in 1970 about the future. From the show notes on Huffduffer: "At the time of this recording Arthur C. Clarke had recently collaborated on the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey with Stanley Kubrick. Alvin Toffler’s mega-influential book, Future Shock, is about to be published. And Margaret Mead is the world’s foremost cultural anthropologist."

Kevin Kelly interview — An interview with Kelly about his new book, "What Technology Wants." Fascinating stuff.

The Value of Ruins — James Bridle from dConstruct 2010 (a design & creativity conference) asks "as we design our future, should we be concerned with the value of our ruins?" 

If you'd like some more background, check out this interview with Jeremy Keith on Huffduffer. And if you're curious about the meaning behind the word 'Huffduffer,' here's an explanation.

Since I’m moving into a hotel for a couple of months at the end of this week, I’ve been shopping around for a Virtual Private Network.

The type of VPN I’m talking about is not the kind that one uses to connect securely to an office network. What I’m talking about is a VPN that provides encryption from a PC to a remote VPN service. This type of VPN protects data while the bits are ‘in the air’ over a public WiFi connection. Once it reaches the VPN company, it’s decrypted and sent along to intended destinations via a wired connection. What you get out of this kind of service is, essentially, a greater level of insurance that your internet activity over public WiFi will remain safe and secure.

When I first started looking into this, I found that there’s a question of whether or not this is really necessary. I found two categories of opinions in my research. Some people feel that it’s generally OK to forego the use of a VPN while engaged in general browsing at a public WiFi hotspot, but it’s best to wait until you get home to do anything sensitive involving passwords. Mail is a particular concern here. This camp notes that it’s generally safe to engage in password-protected activities provided you ensure you’re on a secure connection (i.e. https). However, this is generally not the safest option. Most of the comments I came across suggest that it’s a best practice to use a VPN connection whenever you tap into a public WiFi hotspot (even if you’re on a wired hotel connection), and doubly so if you are going to be on said public network for an extended period of time.

I’m opting for the more secure solution. It’s a low-cost security measure. It’ll give me peace of mind. But which trusted service should I use?

I started out by trying two free options. The first is the popular HotSpot Shield. This service works as advertised, but I found that it notably decreased my connection speed. It also requires the installation of an application that resides in the menu bar. When it’s launched, it fires up an ad-based browser page that is a bit obtrusive, but not too bad. All considered, I concluded that it’s a good option if you’re looking for an occasional-use VPN while, say, at a coffee shop for a few hours. Hotspot Shield also offers a free iPhone VPN option. While the iPhone service was very simple to set up, I could not get it to work on my iPhone after trying for several days.

The second free VPN option I tried is called ItsHidden. The caveat with this free service is that you’re booted off of your connection every 20 minutes. If you don’t want to be disconnected after a set period of time, the service offer a pay option for $12.99 a month. There are two things I liked about ItsHidden. First, it requires no software installation. Second, it was a lot speedier than Hotspot Shield. However, I felt uneasy about entrusting my longterm online activity to the service. Their website offers no clues about who they are, where they’re located, or how long they’ve been in business. And, frankly, it looks like the site was put together in someone’s basement. It doesn’t inspire confidence. I read in one forum that the main reason this service was set up is to accommodate BitTorrent traffic. I’m sure there’s a lot of legit BitTorrent traffic taking advantage of this service, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was, well, kind of shady. So I moved on.

I narrowed down my options to two popular pay options from long-established VPN companies. One is called WiTopia. The other is called HotSpotVPN. Both appear to be great options. The deciding factor in my case was that WiTopia only offered a year subscription, while HotSpotVPN offered month-to-month (and even daily) rates. If you are looking for a long-term relationship, WiTopia is substantially cheaper. They offer one year of 256-bit encrypted SSL service for $60 (in comparison, HotSpotVPN would cost about $138 for a year of 256-bit SSL).

The nice thing about HotSpotVPN—in addition to short-term rates—is that the SSL option offered by the company comes with an additional free PPTP connection, ideal for setting up VPN on an iPhone or iPod Touch. I opted for the cheaper $10.88 month Blowfish 128-bit encryption option after reading in several forums that this amount of encryption, while on the low end of the spectrum of what’s available, is more than adequate.

So there you have it. I signed up yesterday. It works great on my Mac and my iPhone. Significantly, I’ve found no noticeable speed difference while using it. Setup is quite easy: HotSpotVPN e-mailed me a zipped file with my encryption keys and certification files with easy-to-follow instructions about how to install them in my user Library. They also offered up the option to install Tunnelblick, an open source GUI for OpenVPN on the Mac (OpenVPN, I’ve learned, is used by most consumer VPN services).

I can’t comment on Tunnelblick, however, because I didn’t install it. I use an alternative paid VPN client called Shimo for my VPN connections, which I highly recommend. If you’re curious as to why I use Shimo, the main reason is that it seamlessly imports Cisco VPN settings (which is what I use for work). If you’ve ever used the abysmal Cisco VPN client, you’ll understand. Shimo allows me to easily switch between Cisco and, now, my new HotSpotVPN service. I can connect and disconnect from each VPN service in seconds.

One final note: I learned during this process that SSL is generally the best option if you’re looking for the fastest solution that will work anywhere. If you decide to use a VPN service whenever you access a public network, SSL is the way to go.