22 Frames – subtitled video galore!

22frames.comIf you’ve followed my posts/passion for awhile, you will know I’m a HUGE fan of subtitled supported video. I’ve helped quite a few online sites in this area as well as highlighting so much TTS (text to speech) here and also through Karaoke. HERE is a lot of the subtitled video you’ll find on EFL Classroom 2.0 (but there is a lot more too!)

So it is with happiness that I get to tell you about another site to find subtitled video – 22 Frames. It joins other sites like Yappr (from the original Yolango),Dotsub and also Youtube which is really getting heavily into the subtitling game. Further, Real English and English Star (for the moment offline). You might even consider English Central to be of this vein – however, it offers much more….

I was contacted by them and after taking a long hard look, have some good things and some constructive criticism to offer. Here it goes….

Basically, 22 Frames is a video aggregation site – along the lines of others like Blip / Metacafe etc… EXCEPT it pulls in from across the web, all the videos that have subtitles. A cool idea and they continue to refine their search so that users can easily find what they are looking for. Cool. Education even has a category. See an example of a search (“teaching English”) and watching videos there.

Also, they are looking into applications for learning English and want teacher feedback. Please, if you have some time, give them some. They are focusing on idioms and slang – however I’m not too convinced this is too useful. We don’t spend much time using them and they are very contextual. Even with video, I think learners would better spend their time on other things than this. And that is one criticism so far, 22 Frames being too wide in their capture. For ELLs, they should be leveling content for students/teachers. But maybe they want users to eventually do this? The site is quite Beta so this could be their thinking.

Another drawback is that you really have to stream these. If you capture them in whatever manner – you will get the video without the subtitles. Not too useful. Classroom teachers need to download and also download the subs. I’d like to see them provide support for this in some manner. I’m sure it can be done and subtitled could come embedded on the video. Maybe they could have a label for videos that have the subtitles embedded????

I REALLY like the look AND functionality of the site. Works and loads smooth.

You can search for subtitled or subtitled / regular videos. BUT on testing, really found little difference in the two. That’s a drawback and as mentioned how wide the search is. Also, though many videos say “Watch right here” – so much just takes you to a different site. So why not just go there in the first place?

That’s the major drawback — more precise search and categorizing is needed before it will be very useful for students. But it is a start!

I recommend users checking out 22 Frames and reporting back on what you found that was useful. Also what you think about the site. What’s your opinion?????

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ddeubel

Teacher trainer, technology specialist, educational thinker...creator of EFL Classroom 2.0, a social networking site for thousands of EFL / ESL teachers and students around the world.

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4 Responses

  1. Olga says:

    Thanks for the tip. I hope to provide some feedback after thinking. I noticed that they do have a few other things besides idioms/slang on this menu on the home page:

    English Learning Activities
    Learn words and phrases:
    Common Mispronunciations
    Slang Phrases
    Idioms
    Coming soon:
    Browse teaching videos
    “Karaoke”

    Looks better on their site — I just cut and pasted it.

  2. Pascal says:

    Can you go into this Karaoke idea you were talking about more deeply? A new post or something? It might be helpful to students that are hard to motivate.

  3. ddeubel says:

    Hi Pascal,

    Sure, will do. I have some old but very comprehensive blog posts on my private blog at EFL Classroom 2.0. I’ll pull one up and do a make over, update and post here shortly. In the meantime, you can find out a lot about karaoke on my former institute’s site HERE – http://setiteachers.ning.com/forum/topics/making-and-using-karaoke-in

    Thanks for the suggestion,

    David

  1. April 7, 2010

    […] This post was mentioned on Twitter by David Deubelbeiss. David Deubelbeiss said: My review of 22 Frames – beta subtitled video site. http://bit.ly/aNgeuK […]

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