Subtitles

With VIMP Enterprise and VIMP Campus you have two options to add subtitles to a video, which are described in more detail below.

Upload of a .vtt file

To offer your videos to an international audience, you can upload subtitles in multiple languages via the edit form of the video (likewise to chapters). If subtitles have been uploaded for a specific video or not, can be seen, if the CC symbol is visible in the video player to the left of the volume control. By clicking this icon, a menu with all available subtitle languages will pop up.

All you need for the generation of a subtitle file is a text editor. It’s up to you which editor you use – if you don’t have a favorite one, we suggest to use the Windows text editor “Notepad” which is already pre-installed on your Windows computer. Open “Notepad”, which can be found in the “Windows Accessories” folder of the Windows Start Menu usually. Now you’re set to enter the subtitles. The subtitles need to be formatted in a specific format. For better visualization an example subtitle is shown in figure 20:

Make sure you write “WEBVTT FILE” at the beginning of each subtitle file before the actual subtitle information. If this very first line is missing, the subtitles won’t be identified by the video player and thus cannot be turned on. The actual subtitle has to be entered in a very precise format. Make sure your timestamps for every single line are coded in the following way: hh:mm:ss.f --> hh:mm:ss.f followed by a line break (return) and the subtitle line. Please also take care that your timestamps do not overlap, since this would cause unintended behaviors of the subtitles while playing the video.

After you completed your subtitles file, save it to your local hard disk. You can choose the filename on your own, just be sure to remember the location of the file later. If you use umlauts like in German, Spanish, Chinese, Russian or other languages, please make sure to select “UTF-8” for encoding and save the file.

Next you can upload the subtitles file to the VIMP portal to display the subtitles right in the video player. Click the uploaded video on the start page and enter the edit form analogous to the chapter creation in figure 17. Click the link and confirm the message box with “OK”.

You now enter the subtitle form where you can select the saved subtitle file from your disk, choose the appropriate language and save the selection by clicking “Upload”. If you go back to your homepage, select the video and just activate the uploaded subtitles by clicking the CC button as described earlier. If you detect any mistakes or want to adjust the timestamps of the subtitles, feel free to upload the subtitles file again and again. The latest uploaded file will always overwrite the previous one.

Create and edit subtitles directly VIMP

VIMP also gives you the option to create subtitles directly within VIMP using the built-in subtitle manager. You can access the subtitle manager via the media actions on the media details page by clicking "Subtitles":

Now you can add subtitles for all languages available in VIMP to your video by clicking on "Add entry". You can also use the option to let the player set the timestamp of the subtitles by checking the corresponding box and playing the video in parallel.

Subtitles can be saved and deleted individually. You can also save and delete all the subtitles you have created at once:

You can leave the subtitle editor again by clicking “Back to edit form”. If there are any unsaved changes on the page, VIMP will inform you about it with a warning message. All subtitles are stored in the database and are not kept exclusively in the .vtt files. These can still be imported, but it is now also possible to create subtitles directly in VIMP using forms. In addition, subtitle editing has been extensively improved. If the video is running, then the input automatically jumps to the appropriate subtitle entry for the current timestamp. And so that the player does not disappear from view when scrolling, it moves in small format to the lower right edge of the screen.

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