Amazon Elastic Transcoder Announces Caption Support

Posted on: Jun 20, 2014

We are excited to let you know that Amazon Elastic Transcoder now includes Captioning Support for video content. Captioning is the process of displaying text that accompanies the video to transcribe the audio portion of the program or translate the audio into a different language. Starting today you can now use Elastic Transcoder to add, remove, or preserve captions as you transcode your video from one format to another.

Captioning Support helps you make your videos easily accessible to a broader set of viewers who are either hearing impaired, consuming the video in noisy environments such as train rides, or want to enjoy a video presented in a language they don’t understand. To get started with this feature, you simply include caption data with each video in your transcoding job. You may transcode embedded broadcast caption formats such as CEA-608 to newer formats such as WebVTT (Web Video Text Tracks) to reach modern internet enabled devices. You may also supply a separate sidecar file (a stand-alone file containing only captions) along with the original caption file to add support for a language that was not included in the original video. Finally, you may include an output DFXP caption file (which is compatible with the SMPTE-TT standard) to prepare content that complies with FCC rules that require captioning support for programs re-shown on the Internet.

There are no additional costs for using Captioning Support with Amazon Elastic Transcoder beyond the normal usage fees for the service. Learn more about all the supported conversions for captions by visiting the Captioning Support section of the Amazon Elastic Transcoder Developer Guide, or by reading the AWS Blog announcement.