Amara is a collaborative platform (like Wikipedia) where anyone can join in and create subtitles and make content more accessible. 

Before You Begin

• Log in to your Amara account.

  • If you are new to Amara Create your free Amara Username.

  • Amara does not host or store videos.

  • You cannot upload your videos directly from your computer to Amara.

  • We only import video information from the video hosting site.

  • Video must be embeddable and public on the video hosting site.

    • Check in host site settings, whitelist if necessary.

    • If a video is private, users will not be able to view it.

    • If a video is password protected, users must enter the password to view.

• Add a video URL from a hosting site OR by using a direct link. 

  • We support mp3, mp4, ogv, webm file formats.

  • These formats are compatible with the Amara editor and the Amara embedder.

  • This ensures they can play, pause, fast forward, skip back, and navigate to any place in the video.

  • The URL of the video on a video hosting site (Youtube, Vimeo) is in the address bar of the video page:

• Videos you submit to Amara’s public area:

  • Should not have copyright issues or sensitive information.

  • Should be set to public so other users can view them.

    • YouTube: 

      • Public videos

      • Unlisted videos

    • Vimeo:

      • Public videos

      • Password protected videos 

        • Users must enter password to view

  • Videos added to the Amara Public Workspace that have no subtitling activity after 30 days will automatically be removed from Amara.

• You can add videos back at any time when you are ready to begin creating subtitles.

• Videos where subtitles are started but there is no activity for 30 days will not be subject to removal from Amara Public Workspace.

Deleting a video from Amara:

• Amara is a collaborative platform. If you remove a video, you might delete someone else's contribution. Therefore, we ask that you do not request to remove videos once they have been added to Amara if contributions have been made by other members.

• You may delete a video that you added to Amara if you are the only contributor to the video.  You can follow the instructions in the Delete Videos or Subtitles on Amara article.

• Please ensure you agree to the Amara Terms of Service and are comfortable making your video available for captioning and translation by volunteers, before you submit the video.

Add publicly hosted videos to the Amara Public Workspace 

After creating an Amara Account:

1. From the Amara home page, go to the Amara Public Workspace.

2. Click the Add Videos button.

3. Copy and paste the URL from the public hosting site.

4. Select the language spoken in the video.

5. Click the Add to Amara Public button.

If Amara is able to find your video online and recognize the video format, the system will create a Web page for your video and you will be redirected to that video’s page:

If the video you are trying to add has already been added by another user on Amara, you will be directed to the public video page created when the video was added to Amara Public.

Add YouTube Shorts to Amara

If you wish to add captions or translations to YouTube Shorts you can follow these steps to add a YouTube Short to Amara:

• Right click anywhere on the video on YouTube.

• When the black pop-up menu appears, select Copy video URL.

• If Copy video URL gives an error when adding to Amara please use Copy video URL at current time. 

• The URL that gets copied to your clipboard will allow you to add the YouTube Short to Amara so you can start creating captions.

  • Sample of a YouTube Shorts URL: https://youtu.be/SLHUd93FXLp

If you still receive an error when adding YouTube shorts try these steps below to create the correct URL format.

Copy the URL and edit the URL to the correct format

• If the Copy URL step above gives the URL format shown below, this does not work to add the video to Amara.

  • https://www.youtube.com/shorts/2yFkBLX8mtI?t=2&feature=share

• Manually edit the URL using the video ID highlighted in red above.

• Add the video ID (2yFkBLX8mtI) to this URL format

•  https://youtu.be/

• This URL format can be added to Amara. 

  • https://youtu.be/2yFkBLX8mtI

Troubleshoot adding videos to Amara

• Videos must be embeddable.

  • Amara.org does not host video or audio records.

    • We only store subtitles and some related data

    • Amara plays videos from their source location

  • Whitelist www.amara.org for embedding on video source site

• If the video belongs to an Amara team with proprietary videos you will be unable to add the video to the Amara Public Workspace:

View your Videos

Click Amara Public Workspace at the top of the page to view the videos you already added to the public workspace.

This will open a list of video submissions with titles and thumbnails. 

• Click on Add/Edit subtitles to open the video card.

• The video card will list any subtitles already started and allow you to add new languages to begin new subtitles.

Adding Private Videos on Amara 

If you are interested in a private workspace please check out Amara Enterprise options, or contact our team at enterprise@amara.org!

Thank you for your contributions to support an inclusive and accessible media ecosystem!

• If you have any questions or suggestions, please share your feedback!

To submit a quick ticket, click No in the Did you find it helpful link below.