UofT-supported video hosting platform MyMedia allows viewing permissions to be set to Public, making it easy to share videos with individuals outside of U of T. Another advantage of MyMedia, is that public links on MyMedia do not expire. Video links shared publicly using Stream (on Sharepoint), on the other hand, have an expiration date which needs to be updated manually.
However, MyMedia does not have a feature to automatically generate video captions and transcripts, and publicly shared videos require captioning (see AODA Web Accessibility Guidelines for Videos). MyMedia does allow you to upload caption files manually for each video. That means that captions need to be created on another platform and uploaded to MyMedia. One way to generate captions is to use Stream on SharePoint which is a part of O365 suite. Adding captions to your videos using both MyMedia in conjunction with Stream can provide both captions and flexible video sharing settings.
This guide outlines the process to:
- Generate captions using Stream (on SharePoint)
- Add generated captions to a video on MyMedia.
Before You Start
- Upload video to Stream on SharePoint.
See our step-by-step guide: How to upload videos to Stream (on SharePoint)
Jump To
1. Open Video in Stream
- Go to https://stream.office.com/ to access Stream.
- Enter the name of the video in the Search bar
- Select Search button
- Select the video listed in the search result
2. Generate Automatic Captions
- Select Video Settings
- Select Transcript and captions
- Select Generate button
- Select the language used in the video
- Select Generate button. Depending on the length of the video, it can take a few minutes to about an hour to generate captions
3. Download Captions File
- After the transcript and captions are generated, select More (three dots)
- Select Download
- Select Download as .vtt. This is the video caption file which will be used in the next steps.
4. Upload Video to My Media
Now that you have downloaded your auto-captions, next you will add your video MyMedia.
- Log into MyMedia. See How do I login to my MyMedia account?
- Select Upload button to upload a video
5. Upload Captions File to Video
Once your video has been uploaded, you can add your captions as a Text Track.
- Select Edit icon next to the video that the captions need to be uploaded to
- Select +Create New button under 'Text Tracks' tab
- Select Captions from the drop-down menu
- Select Upload a file option and navigate to the .vtt file downloaded from Microsoft Stream
- Select Create button
When uploading captions files to MyMedia you may occasionally get errors for 'incorrect escapes'. These are typically due to special characters in the file (like '&' or '%' ) - removing those characters and re-uploading the file typically removes the errors.
If you would like to add your video to your Quercus Course shell, please see: