General questions
What is Keskidi?
Keskidi is a wiki service build to add and edit video subtitles in a collaborative manner. It was build to fit a gap, that there are plenty of videos on the Internet, plenty of good documentaries, shows, food recipes, high-level free courses, but many of them don't benefit to the rest of the world because of language barriers.
How does Keskidi work?
We strive to bring a simple tool that, let's say, your grandma would be able to quickly handle. Once you get your account, which is free to create, all you need to do is to import a video located a video sharing platform like YouTube or MySpace, and start captioning it. Users of the site will spot your initiative and will help you get it fully captioned, while others will translate the texts into their own language. Whenever you want, you could embed the video into a web page by copy-pasting a short code given on each single video page. This way, you could provide a sort of DVD-ish video player fulled of different languages to your friends or your blog readers.
Will Keskidi remain free?
As long as we can, yes. And if we go commercial, there will always be a free version of Keskidi. So it will be fun anyways.
Using Keskidi tools and contents
I have a video to translate. How can I do it?
You first need to host your videos somewhere. Right now, Keskidi only works with hosted videos. This will change in the future but until then, we recommend you the most popular ones, like YouTube, the most reliable video hosting platform but uploads are limited to 100 Mo, or any of the following short list: Blip.tv, Dailymotion, Myspace, or Metacafe. You can of course host your video by your own. If you decide to go this way, a good newbie guide could be found on Make Internet TV.
Once your video is accessible on the Web, go on our submit form. Copy-paste the link to the web page where your video is (something like http://yoursite.com/video-page or http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=video-identifier) and wait until the import is done. Add some tags to it and voila, you're ready to start captioning and subtitling your video.
Why is there a timer?
The timer is the sole tool you need to care about to caption a video. It requires to click on it twice. The first click sets the time when your text appears and the second indicates when it goes off the screen. If your time is not synchronized with the video or that you spotted an error on someone's past edits, you can always tweak it by updating the wiki page.
Can I re-use the contents?
We're excited to offer subtitles for use under the Creative Commons license for wikis. This can be a great way to enhance your website and promote the dissemination of videos. And, it's easy to do. Just remember that the rationale behind the license is a simple combination of "giving credit where credit is due" and "acknowledging the hard work of others." Moreover, anyone who use subtitles needs to know that it did not come from professionals. Since Keskidi is a "wiki" translations can sometimes be wrong or misleading until someone else corrects them.
The attribution requires a link to the current version of the video page on Keskidi because version are constantly evolving. Mistaken meaning may have been corrected, mistyped words may have been fixed, and so on. Linking to the original page will also ensure that contributors get credit for what they've written.
Note that under the Creative Commons license all commercial uses are prohibited.
Can subtitles be imported on another video player?
Of course. Right now, there are available in time-text XML format, a standard method provided by the W3C for displaying text which is synchronized with other elements, such as video and audio. In the future, we will also provided subtitles in the SubRip format (.srt). As SubRip subtitles are used by most popular video players, we believe it will let you watch videos in your language and in your favorite player.
Videos
Which videos are allowed?
As we start, we focus on the most popular kind of videos. On the web, this means focusing on Flash Video files while accepting two other big formats, the MOV and AVI ones. Three formats, a cheap start? Not really. Their combination gives you the choice to import over 84 million videos hosted on YouTube, DailyMotion, Myspace, Blip.tv and self-hosted videos.
When a video subtitling ends?
To give an idea of the edit chain, Keskidi works like Wikipedia. Time will tell which versions are good or not. This doesn't imply the most recent a subtitle is, the better it is. By letting all texts opened to update, people can always correct a text and raise the accuracy of a translation. In any case, you don't have to worry about getting the most recent version as we do it for you.