Easier Twitter Powered Subtitles for Youtube Movies

Pretty much all the sentiment I’ve picked from my post on Twitter Powered Subtitles for Conference Audio/Videos on Youtube is that the process for generating the subtitles is too complicated, so I’ve had a go at simplifying it:

The workflow is now as follows. Suppose you have a recording of an event that people were tweeting through using a particular hashtag, and you want to annotate the recording using the tweets made at the time as subtitles.

Go to Twitter advanced search and search for the particular hashtag;

1. Tweak the number of results on the page and the date setting (if necessary):
   
2. If you only want tweets FROM a particular person, limit the search that way too:
   
3. If the results you want to convert to subtitles are on “older” search results pages, navigate to the required results page
4. When you have a results page containing the tweets you want to convert to subtitles, grab the URL of that results page and copy it into the subtitler form at http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/twitterSubtitles.php
5. Optionally, if you want to specify the tweet that you want to be the first subtitle, copy its URL (that is, the URL that is pointed to by the View tweet link for that tweet:
   
6. Optionally again, if you want to specify the tweet on the results page that you want to be the lastsubtitle, grab it’s URL and paste it into the form.
7. Generate the subtitles:
   
8. Save the page as a text file with the suffix .sub:
   
9. You can now upload the .sub subtitle file to Youtube.

So hopefully, that’s a little easier? (Note that there is a also a bookmarklet on the subtitler page that will create the subtitle file directly from a Twitter advanced search results page.)

PS here are some more thoughts about ways in which the subtitler might develop: Twitter Powered Youtube Subtitles, Reprise: Anytime Commenting.

PPS if anyone fancies converting the Javascript that generates the subtitles in the browser to PHP that will do the processing on the server, please feel free to post the code back here as a comment ;-)

PPPS Woudln’t it be good if CoverItLive offered an exportable subtitle file from previous events? In the meantime, does anyone know if it’s possible to get an RSS feed of posts from previous CoverItLive event commentaries?

PPPs See also: Twitterprompter?, discussing several possible use cases for Twitter in a live presentation environment.