To kick off the productive year ahead, EngageMedia met up for the second time with Gurindam12, our ASTEKI partners in Riau, Indonesia, to discuss and share more about online video distribution and subtitling.

As we’ve mentioned in our report on the last workshop in Riau, the Gurindam12 group utilizes video and new media to cover and address many issues surrounding this vast area in the middle of Sumatra, ranging from the rapidly growing rate of deforestation to the loss of much of Riau’s unique culture.

Our 5-day workshop with them began with exploring FTP for the stable uploading of files and Handbrake, for efficiently compressing video. The several technical discussions helped everyone to re-cap and gain a better understanding of how best to work with and distribute online video.

With the help of Seelan (our new Video Lingua Coordinator), we had a session on how to use Universal Subtitles for collaborative, online subtitling and translation. We also went through the capabilities and benefits of the EngageMedia team page on Universal Subtitles, which we encourage all of you to join. Here’s a recent video that’s been subtitled using Universal Subtitles. Check it out, and please add more translations to it to help more people understand it’s important content. As luck would have it, this workshop coincided with some major developments on the EngageMedia site. We’ve successfully upgraded our site to HTML5 and added direct subtitling capabilities for videos via Universal Subtitles. Since last December, we’ve also built and expanded our server in Indonesia, to help local viewers access our site faster.

We closed this workshop with an added video shooting and editing session that emerged out of the spontaneous exchange of ideas between Gurindam12 and ourselves. One of results of the session is viewable here, and many more should be up soon!

Check out our previous blogpost about Riau Workshop I