I had 9 users in my own instance of Jitsi, sharing one of my YouTube videos with captions corrected and displayed on-screen. Only 2 users could see them — the 2 users from Europe (I’m in the US).
Thankfully this time no one was Deaf or hard of hearing, and the people who needed it most were the people who had captions (though others would have liked them as well).
Playing around with 2 devices after the event, I can’t get closed captions to show up as an attendee. I tried turning the captions preferences on for my mac laptop, turned on caption preferences on YouTube, and so on. No go.
Are YouTube captions working for attendees in the US for other installations? There’s other bugs if someone drops out of the call during a video presentation and comes back in…the video may not start and may not be at the same timestamp if it does, etc. That’s a separate issue as I can re-start the whole video or something — so that’s not quite as important as the captions issue which is a legal accessibility problem.
Then the audio doesn’t work. Maybe I’m not understanding what you mean. I’d have to loopback the computer audio. And that’s not straightforward (and not really safe/good to do anyway for a bunch of reasons).
I wish the share video feature would let me play my own videos without sending them up to YouTube also. It’s all my own content. But once it’s streamed we get into all the DRM blocking etc. — it’s a mess. I have the and own the video, I have the .srt file because I’m the one that corrected the captions and so on, it would be nice to be able to share it with my meeting without it being glitchy and unreliable.
Anyway, if anyone knows why or how to fix Jitsi so that all viewers are at the same timestamp reliably, pause/play works across everyone’s session even those who have to re-join the meeting because they get dropped, and all have captions on, please let me know.
If I understand you correctly, the issue you’re having is that closed captions on YouTube are not showing for some of the participants in your meeting. If so, I think it’s important to understand how Jitsi presents YouTube videos.
YouTube videos on Jitsi use the YouTube iFrame API. This means that all of the information is coming from YouTube, so whatever YouTube makes available in their iFrame API is what gets relayed. Jitsi is not generating the video or processing it in any way, it’s merely forwarding what YouTube makes available. If closed captions are not completely supported in YouTube’s iFrame API, then there’s little that Jitsi can do about that.
You can share your own video directly without going through YouTube if you store the video in a publicly accessible repository that can be linked to with a URL. I’m not sure about how you’d handle the .srt file (haven’t tried it), but sharing your own videos directly is supported.