Here at YouTube, we're always trying to find new ways to enrich your viewing experience and to help video creators reach a wider audience. As part of this goal, we've added a new captioning feature which allows you to give viewers a deeper understanding of your video. Captions can help people who would not otherwise understand the audio track to follow along, especially those who speak other languages or who are deaf and hard of hearing.

You can add captions to one of your videos by uploading a closed caption file using the "Captions and Subtitles" menu on the editing page. To add several captions to a video, simply upload multiple files. If you want to include foreign subtitles in multiple languages, upload a separate file for each language. There are over 120 languages to choose from and you can add any title you want for each caption. If a video includes captions, you can activate them by clicking the menu button located on the bottom right of the video player. Clicking this button will also allow viewers to choose which captions they want to see.

Some of our partners have already started using captions to offer you a better understanding of their videos (even with the audio turned off):

- BBC Worldwide: captions are provided in five different languages on this clip from Top Gear.
- CNET: tech product reviews from CNET's Crave blog.
- UC Berkeley: footage from the Opencast Project Open House.
- MIT: full lectures on subjects like Physics.
- Gonzodoga: English subtitles on this awesome Japanese animation.

We hope captions will serve to tighten the YouTube community by bringing together international users from different cultures.
We're excited to see what kinds of fun and creative uses for captions you'll be coming up with for your videos!

For more information about how to use captions, visit this page.
The YouTube Team

Over at the Android bat cave, there's some interesting news going down. Today, Android announced the public release of its "cupcake" branch. This new branch offers a number of application enhancements, including bug fixes, a video recorder, the ability to save MMS attachments and more. System enhancements include better bluetooth support, better HTTP handling and, most importantly, a new JavaScript engine built on SquirrelFish.

Unlike the main Android trunk release, which is built on Linux 2.6.25, cupcake has been built on the updated Linux 2.6.27. Notably, the new system software offers basic x86 support and will allow third party manufacturers to develop and deploy their own handset-specific APIs.

Cupcake is a development branch rather than a release branch. According to the cupcake roadmap page, it remains distinctly a work in progress. This first release represents a big commit of changes since Android's 1.0 release; future plans are for smaller updates as the cupcake changes stabilize. The announcement page emphasizes that cupcake is an outgrowth of Android's roadmap; the roadmap allows for project forking with development continuing on in private branches, which is what cupcake is.

The cupcake branch updates will eventually be merged back into the main Android trunk. This will probably not happen until early to mid January due to the American holiday season. Given the number of bug fixes covered by the cupcake release, this will likely be a welcome update for most Android users.

reference : link