A significant number of English learners are practicing English listening through captioned videos.

Approximately 278 million people worldwide have some form of hearing impairment [WHO].

There has been over a 300 percent increase in online video watching since 2003. Further, most watching is done during work hours. Workplace computers are often muted or have no speakers [Nielsen].

Several billions of videos are watched monthly worldwide, with many of them in different languages.

22frames aggregates captioned videos from all over the web.

The web offers a world of quality videos for our enjoyment and enlightenment. Captioned and subtitled videos, in particular, can be especially helpful in different ways for a large population of Internet users. A problem, however, is that such videos are generally scattered and/or mixed with all other videos across the Internet. Up until now, there was no central place to easily and reliably search for and discover such videos across multiple video hosts. 22frames was built, in part, to provide such a place. In turn, an additionally important goal is to drive significant traffic to caption/subtitle friendly video hosts and creators.

By continually indexing videos from these multiple hosts, this site offers an increasingly comprehensive catalog covering many different topics. Indexing is mostly automated using APIs and specialized web crawlers. User submissions of videos and channels also play an important role.

22frames is more than captions.

Besides providing a search interface, there are quite a few things we can do with an index of captioned videos. It turns out that watching captioned videos provides a way to learn phrases of a language by seeing real world scenarios. There are lots of things under the hood in this area that we will be releasing in the near future and will be sharing with pronunciation dictionaries for learning how to pronounce words. Some of this work even involves indexing an experimental class of non-captioned videos. Stay tuned for updates.

22frames is a work in progress.

22frames is in early beta right now, and there is much more work to do for our team. For example, there are certain kinds of captioned/subtitled videos that other engines do not detect because the words are ingrained in the actual picture of the video rather than being separately uploaded overlay text. We are working on improving the rate we index such videos since the captioned/subtitled videos on many hosts are made this way. As our backend technology matures, we also plan to spend more time improving the user-experience side of things--e.g., supporting the EmbedPlus third-party YouTube embed tool for enhanced playback. Finally, we welcome your contributions. You can suggest videos, and/or email us if you have any interesting ideas.

When this site was nothing more than idea, someone said it would be "a kind of Silent Film 2.0." This comment, in fact, led to the name 22frames. FYI: During the silent film era, films were often shot at rates anywhere between 16 and 23 frames per second. 22 sounded the coolest to us, and here we are!