Transcribe! can display most video files, synchronised with Transcribe!'s variable-speed audio playback. Basic help for this is in the main Transcribe! Help, but here are some additional notes. You will find a link to view a video of this feature in action, near the bottom of this page
You do need to have the video as a file on your hard disk first - Transcribe! will not load videos directly from YouTube or from a DVD. This is because there are legal issues involved, and because services like YouTube often change their systems in order to prevent this from working. So if we release a version of Transcribe! which can download from YouTube, it's quite likely that it will soon stop working.
If you have any problems with video then there are also some FAQs here.
Transcribe! can handle many video formats but not all of them. There are many ways of downloading videos and most of them offer options about what video format to use for the download. So if you have downloaded a video but Transcribe! won't play it, then try tellng the downloader to use a different format. Try mp4 first. Or try a different downloader. As a last resort you could load the video into a video editing program and save it in a different format.
Wikipedia - Comparison of YouTube downloaders - it's entirely possible that this may be more up to date than my list below.
FounderJar - a list showing many ways of downloading YouTube videos.
If you search the web for "download youtube video" or something like that, you will find many options. Some have advertisements which you should avoid clicking on. Also one time I saw a dialog telling me to install an updated driver. You should never accept such a suggestion from a website as it would probably be malware.
Apowersoft Video Download Capture.
VideoGrabber online downloader.
Firefox Video DownloadHelper plugin for the Firefox browser.
When you download a video using this, there is a Settings menu - click the "gear" icon - and you can select different formats and resolutions for the downloaded video. For use with Transcribe! you may find it works best if you avoid mkv and webm formats, and choose mp4 instead.
You will need to copy the DVD (or part of it) to your hard disk first, as a video file. There are various programs for doing this, search the web to find one.
A video consists of a series of still frames (pictures) displayed in rapid succession - let's say 30 per second. But a video file does not contain 30 complete independent frames for each second. Instead, it contains some complete independent frames, maybe one per second or thereabouts, or maybe as few as one every ten seconds or even fewer. These self-contained frames are known as "key frames", and the frames between them are encoded as the difference between the previous frame and the current one. This greatly reduces the size of the file since most of the time in most videos, the differences between two consecutive frames can be encoded with less data than is required to encode a complete frame independently. And it works fine for playing a video forwards in the usual way. However if you want to start playing from a random point within a video then you must start from the last key frame before the one you are interested in and then decode frames up to the one you want. This can take as much as several seconds depending on how far from the key frame you are and on the quality of the video. A high quality video has more data for each frame and therefore takes longer to decode.
Most media players deal with this by always starting playback from a key frame, and hoping that you won't mind (or notice). In fact most media players don't allow you to specify precisely where you want to start from, they merely give you a slider you can drag from left to right. However Transcribe! deals very precisely with time and where you are in the track, which is necessary for the purpose of transcription, since video of a player's fingers is not much use if it is displaced by several seconds from what you are hearing. This is why Transcribe! cannot always start playing video from any desired point instantly.
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