Adding subtitle support to MediaCrush

We have just finished rolling out support for video with subtitles and closed captioning, for the sake of our hard-of-hearing and monolingual friends. We now support subtitles in the SRT, WebVTT, and SSA formats (the three most common), so if you upload a video with embedded subtitles, you'll now be able to use the settings on the bottom-right of each video to turn them on and off.

Source: Bakemonogatari: Saitou Chiwa - Staple Stable. Subtitles by CoalGirls

We've built this with the help of some great open-source projects. SRT is converted to WevVTT in-house, and then WebVTT is supported by the browser natively when possible, or via captionator.js when required. SSA support is offered by the wonderful libjass. Interestingly, this is the first time we've added client-side external dependencies to MediaCrush. Thanks, guys, your projects are fantastic.

If you'd like to add subtitles to your own video, we suggest using a matroska (mkv) container, with libass subtitles. To edit those subtitles, we suggest another open-source project: aegisub. Aegisub accepts donations, by the way! For that matter, so do we.

Thanks again for using MediaCrush, and enjoy the new features!