Microsoft's Channel 9 gets loco (...um... I mean... localized) - Plus many of videos are now getting captions too!

Willy's Reflections - Localized video gems for Visual Studio 2013 … get the popcorn!

There is a great collection of Visual Studio 2013, available in several languages, developed by the Cloud & Enterprise Intl. Team. Special mention for Carsten Kneip, for making me aware of these gems on Channel9, and Shawn Donat, for being the main driver.

Captions now available on many Channel 9 videos

Hey folks, starting a few years back, Channel 9 has been working to add caption support to our videos. There are two sides needed to make this happen; first we needed support in our code to store the captions, associate them with a video and display them in our primary players (Silverlight and HTML 5). Second, we needed to actually have captions created for our content!

Well, the first was an engineering problem, and we managed that quite a long time ago, but the second took quite a bit longer. At this point though, I feel we can declare some measure of victory. New content published by the Channel 9 team is being professionally captioned in English, then Bing's translation service is used to convert those captions into 13 languages (Chinese simplified, Chinese traditional, Czech, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, and Turkish). These captions are available when viewing the content on the site, through either the Silverlight player or the HTML 5 player. Here are some shots of what it should look like:

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I've said again and again, that Channel 9 is a resource that any and all Microsoft sphere dev's must use and follow. That said, it's been less of a resource for non-English speakers. With this update, it's now so much more open and available to the rest of the world. Congrats to the team on this!