It’s so sad. The Babel fish still has not been found on earth. If we want to present videos to a wider audience, we have to rely on dubbing, voice-over, or captions. Unfortunately, the Interactive Video Library of H5P doesn’t support the latter yet. Someone gave it a shot late last year, but it seems it never got implemented.

Well, YouTube offers to augment videos with captions. Also, H5P supports to use videos directly from YouTube. I took the liberty of digging into some undocumented features of YouTube’s API, and I wrote some code. As a result, I have something that seems to be working. Start the video and see for yourself…

UPDATE: YouTube changed its API. My implementation won’t work anymore.

Make it cute and cuddly!

As I mentioned on Twitter already: We want it to be cute and cuddly, right?

First of all, I am not sure if it runs smoothly on all the major browsers and platforms. Maybe you could have a look on your system and report your findings in the comments below?

Secondly, the video has to be started before you can choose a language (if there are captions available). The same is true for choosing the video quality by the way, and that’s why both icons are ghosted before playing. A workaround would be to start the video automatically, wait for a certain signal from YouTube, and then stop playing and jump back to the start. This shouldn’t take too much time, but it might be visible. I still have to check that.

Furthermore, we slowly but surely might run into trouble with all the icons down in the player’s toolbar. It’s becoming quite crowded, although here on this blog the content width is so small that H5P switches to its alternate mode anyway. It hides options behind the button with the three dots. What do you think? Is it user friendly enough? Should the alternate version become the default? Just leave me a comment!

Oh, and if you happen to come across any other bugs, please just let me know!