YouTube Expands Support and Customization Options for Captions

YouTube has announced a rather important upgrade to the captions system used by millions of videos. YouTube now supports more formats, enables more customization and is taking greater efforts to support captions initially created for movies or TV.

For one, it's now expanding automatic captions and transcript synchronization to Japanese, Korean and English. The technology takes a simple transcript and then figures out the timing of each line. At the same time, caption and subtitle support has been expanded to 155 languages.

Another important addition is the ability of customizing the look of the captions as they appear over the video. What's more, YouTube now supports positioning for captions if the original file includes this data.

It's not just small creators that benefit from the new features, YouTube now boasts support for a number of formats used by broadcasters.