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Closed Captioning In Web Video?
mforbes writes "Like many geeks, I enjoy watching TV, movies, and streamed video. However, in company with 2%-3% of the population, I suffer from a problem known as Central Auditory Processing Disorder, which essentially means that I have difficulty separating the sounds of human voices from various background noises. When watching TV and when watching movies at home, this isn't a problem, as I can simply turn on the closed captioning. (I find radio to be simply an annoyance.) How much effort would it take the major purveyors of Internet video (the broadcasting majors, etc.) to include an option for CCTV? I doubt the bandwidth required would be more than 1% of that required for the video already being presented. As a social libertarian, I would never ask for government regulation of such an enterprise; I ask only that the major studios be aware of the difficulties that those of us with auditory disorders face. If it's rough for me, how much more difficult can it be for someone who can't hear at all?"
AOL video provides CC on some videos. It really is up to the studio to provide the CC (which there is a defined spec) to their online counter parts. After that its just a matter of the player supporting it - which the AOL video player does.
Lots of google talks have closed captioning and I use them to watch the talk without listening to the audio. This is really nice sometimes and often beneficial when there are foreign speakers with heavy accents.
Youtube, Google Video, etc; aren't captioned at all. It'd be great if videos were captioned- it'd also serve as a nice way for people to browse those sites at work without having to deal with people overhearing the videos.
Google should get on it.
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You may want to check out dotSUB.com -- a site dedicated to collaborative subtitling of videos. Not a panacea, but it's something.
http://dotsub.com/
As a social libertarian, you should know that the market drives companies to produce closed captioning, so as to expand their viewing audience. If you're referring to free content on the web, you don't have very much leverage to convince them to spend the extra resources.
I don't think any of the big companies will do this for a very long time. What I expect will happen is some startup company will offer this as a way to get that 1%-2% market share. Then once the big companies realize what they are doing they will follow behind. Because there is no point for them to offer it until someone is taking their business away from them.
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I always thought the difficulty of separating voices from background noise was the result of poor sound editing (especially when movies are transferred to DVD). I was watching "Flags of our Fathers" the other night, and the remastered sound editing was so piss-poor, with dialog dynamic levels well below the background sound levels, that I found myself repeatedly re-playing scenes. It saddens me that studios are so quick to rush their movies to DVD they don't even take the time to preserve the sound quality.
Subtitles can create problems.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
Its not like TV - you have a hi-res monitor capable of displaying plenty of text. Just include a text link, or embed the video in a page with text, displaying the dialog.
Now there's a thought - a REAL dialog box :-)
To be frank, the reason why TV has closed captioning is because of laws. I don't think it is a question of social libertarianism, but rather a question of equal access. There is NO reason of any sort why closed captioning can't be done. It is cheap and easy and the only thing it does is expand the market for the producers of videos. It is a thing that should be required, otherwise an important minority (people with hearing impairments) is being ignored. It has the added bonus that a lot of non-hearing impaired people like them.
The real question is, do the various video codecs include specifications for easy to add captions? I know that with videos I've worked on, I've just used Adobe Premiere to add in a text layer, and it seemed like a really clunky way of doing things.
His political views are pertinent to the discussion -- he is suggesting that it should not be regulated by government. By mentioning that, I would imagine he has limited the amount of "the government should regulate it" comments and therefore minimized the politically charged discourse. Please spare us your policing (and your unkind sig).
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Here's your generic open-source internet video closed caption. Please feel free to distribute it under the BSD license.
BEGIN CLOSED CAPTION
[cheesy elevator music]
Oh ah yes that's it yes baby ooohh right uh uh yes yes ysss ysss! oh god yes more omigod YES
[sound of bed breaking]
[cheesy elevator music]
END CLOSED CAPTION - LOOP
Kevin Smith on Prince
I see a project here for client-side voice recognition software that converts incoming sounds to text. Anyone want to start a new project?
The question is not whether the government should regulate it, but whether they already do. I recall a minor uproar amongst Libertarians here last year when it became a legal requirement for web sites in the USA to conform to accessibility regulations (even though it's pretty trivial for standards-compliant code). I wonder if this same law extends to video on the web, and whether the likes of YouTube are operating illegally. There might have been some opt-out clause for user-provided content (otherwise I can't imagine MySpace existing), but what about web sites for TV companies?
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Mine stems from a different cause - Alports syndrome. I wear hearing aids, and as anyone who could once hear normally and now wears then can attest, they suck! Well, they're better than being deaf, but in some circumstances you may as well be. I am a habitual user of CC, but not all programs have it and many that do, do a very poor job of syncing the captioning up with the video. Argh. ANYWAY, that out of the way, the reason is of course money. CC costs money. Someone has to sit down and transcribe every word said and enter in into the CC system. That someone probably wants to be paid for their work. Free online content isn't going to support that sort of thing, and I kind of doubt that most ad-driven sites are making enough bucks to cover the cost either. Americans with Disability Act? Hah. OK, force content providers to add CC to their streams. Guess what? You're going to lose a bunch of streams - and probably the most interesting ones. Big guns like CNN will handle it, but small providers? The very ones who aren't spitting out the mass produced pap and biased (well, at least not all biased the same way) journalism? Bu-bye! Online content does not follow the same financial model as commercial broadcast. So, while I'd love to see it, it's not going to happen any time soon.
According to the Royal National Institute for Deaf People (A UK charity), there are nearly nine million people deaf and hard of hearing people in the UK alone. I'm sure a fair proportion of these would benefit from subtitling for online content - I certainly would. I am deaf in one ear, and wear a hearing aid to help boost what remains of my hearing in the other, and have difficulty understanding a lot of online content. I find the only reliable medium for subtitles to be DVDs - TV subtitling in the UK differs widely depending on network. And when the content is available online, for example from the BBC, subtitling is not present - even for content that was subtitled on TV!
Whilst it needs to be done, I doubt it will be - seems there's just not enough money in it. Guess I'll have to keep on buying those DVDs, or missing out on a lot of content.
Just another harmless drunk
When you think about sites like youtube, you can't hope to have users caption their videos before uploading, but you still want this content available in an accessible way. OpenCaptions takes any online video source, and allows user-captioning, that can be layed over video in a number of ways. It still requires a captioner, like any other captions, but allows the tasks to be distributed to anyone who wants to lend a hand at captioning a video.
From the about page:
Open Captions allows anyone to add captions and subtitles to Internet video - caption your own work, or a favorite video from another website. Captioning allows for everyone to share the same media experience on the Internet regardless of hearing abilities and language barriers. Open Captions wants to encourage more people to caption videos for each other, this site will help provide the tools and forum for online captions. The phrase 'Open Captions' is referring to a community of people transcribing and translating Internet videos for the world to watch. The term 'open captions' is also used technically to describe captions that are always available on some videos.
At the end of the program, they credit whomever payed to develop the closed captions. Until recently, it was always one government agency (at least, whenever I noticed it. Small sample size warning.) I forgot which one.
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Wouldnt this be covered under the Americans with Disabilities Act already?
perhaps he just needs a firmware upgrade?
Stop Computers/Cars Analogies on S
Offer x large numbers of hours of decent content mailed back on disk for every hour of volunteer transcribing? There might be a ton of semi or full retired folks might want to get into that, if the software deal was setup for them and it was easy to use and understand.
Point taken. But that begs the question (if YouTube IS operating illegally, for example) of whether having and enforcing such regulations would so stifle creativity that it would deny EVERYONE the advances in question. In other words, if you let YouTube become YouTube and then require it to add things like closed captioning, eventually everybody benefits from it. If you make it harder to be YouTube in the first place, maybe no one will ever see what it can be. I'm just thinking out loud here, and it's admittedly not really the point we're talking about. But it struck me as an interesting side point, I guess.
You're right, though, the question should be whether such laws are already on the books. I wonder, though, whether the original poster would very likely know about it if it was already law, given the fact that (if he lives in the U.S.) he lives with aspects of the Americans With Disabilities Act every day.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
There are a lot on Google Videos. I would like to see more since I am partially deaf and can't hear well as well.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Ok, so, we go with the laws for equal access does that mean that u-tube should be mandated to add closed captioning to all it's videos too?
Try again.
Closed Captioning wasn't a market-driven process, it was a social-equity driven process, a government-driven process.
[T]he Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in 1976 set aside line 21 for the transmission of closed captions in the United States. Once the Commission gave its approval, PBS engineers developed the caption editing consoles that would be used to caption prerecorded programs, the encoding equipment that broadcasters and others would use to add captions to their programs, and prototype decoders.
Toward the end of the technical development project at PBS, it became clear that in order to get the cooperation of the commercial television networks, it would be necessary to establish a nonprofit, single-purpose organization to perform this captioning. And so in 1979, HEW announced the creation of the National Captioning Institute.
On March 16, 1980, NCI broadcast the first closed-captioned television series. The captions were seen in households that had the first generation of closed caption decoders. A silence had been broken. For the first time ever, deaf people across America could turn on their television sets-with a caption decoder-and finally understand what they had been missing on television.
With this success, it was only natural that captioned television viewers would want more accessible programming like prime-time series, soap operas, talk shows, game shows, sports, children's programming, cartoons, and home videos--the same rich and wide variety of programming that hearing people take for granted. They wanted instant access to live programs such as national and local newscasts. In 1982, NCI developed real-time captioning, a process for captioning newscasts, sports events, specials or other live broadcasts as the events are being televised. In real-time captioning, court reporters who have been trained as real-time captioners type at speeds of over 225 words per minute to give viewers instantaneous access to live news, sports and information. As a result, the viewer at home sees the captions within two to three seconds of the words being spoken.
In addition to a wide variety of captioned TV programs, viewers also can enjoy their favorite releases on home video. In 1980, there were only three-captioned home video titles. Today, deaf viewers can routinely expect new home video releases on VHS and DVD to be captioned.
NCI ensured a bright future for captioned television by partnering with ITT Corporation to develop the first caption-decoding microchip that could be built directly into new television sets at the manufacturing stage. This led to the introduction and subsequent passage of the Television Decoder Circuitry Act in 1990, which mandated that, by mid-1993, all new television sets 13 inches or larger manufactured for sale in the U.S. must contain caption-decoding technology. Now, millions of people have access to captions with the push of a button on their remote controls. Also in 1990, The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was passed to ensure equal opportunity for persons with disabilities. The ADA prohibits discrimination against persons with disabilities in employment, State and local government services, businesses that are public accommodations or commercial facilities, and in transportation. Title III of the ADA requires that public facilities, such as hospitals, bars, shopping centers and museums (but not movie theaters), provide access to verbal information on televisions, films or slide shows. Captioning is considered one way of making such information available to people who are deaf or hard of hearing. Federally funded public service announcements also must be captioned. The U.S. Congress continued to show its support of closed captioning by passing the Telecommunications Act of 1996. To implement the closed captioning requirements included in the Act, the FCC established rules and implementation schedules for th
I have Dyspraxia, which creates symptoms very similar to Central Auditory Processing Disorder in some people. (this situation applies to me). For me, closed captions are Essential.
I'm often dismayed by closed captions on regular TV that are often garbled (words are omitted, grammar is improperly done, and worst of all, sentences trail off into a garble of random characters that are impossible to decipher. Also annoying is the fact that on some shows, the dialogue and captions are out of sync, so it makes it even more difficult for me to follow.
I feel that it is necessary to impose some sort of quality control that will keep these problems from happening in web video as often as they occur on broadcast TV.
"It is a denial of justice not to stretch out a helping hand to the fallen; that is the common right of humanity."
How hard would it be to adapt speech/voice recognition software to this purpose? Everyone talks about how far along that kind of stuff has come... I know the background noise would present the biggest problem, but I think that there's got to be some software company out there that can tackle it.
>There is NO reason of any sort why closed captioning can't be done. It is cheap and easy
The true mark of someone who's never done something is when they say "It is cheap and easy". (The engineer in me knows that too well.)
It is neither cheap nor easy.
NOT CHEAP: The prices for closed-captioning production and encoding software start at around US$2k, and quickly climb to almost US$10k. I own a video production business, and those prices are simply out-of-reach for the few times (zero) that a client has ever asked for CC.
NOT EASY: There have been a few times when clients have asked me to add captions (open, on-screen text) to training videos at selected points. Simply transcribing dialog takes a long time. It also takes time (ie: costs money. ie: is not cheap) to synchronize the caption with the video.
OH, AND THERE'S STANDARDS: Closed captioning is not a one-for-one straight transcript of the words spoken. There are paraphrasings, there are audio hints. There is a reason why there's only a small handful of companies that do CC for professional production... It takes training. It takes practice. It takes discipline. It's not flashy, trivial, or cheap.
The non-broadcast demand for is so incredibly small. So, it's incredibly expensive in money and time and expertise.
Yeah, I'd love to be able to add CC to my work. It's how I view most TV and movies myself. But without some breakthrough, it ain't gonna happen soon.
Tom
Just get a massive sound system, and turn that bitch up til you can make out what's happening!
Of course, if you're into anime you don't have that problem. :-)
"Just get a Q-Tip. We don't need you to make up some disorder because you're too lazy to clean your ears."
[X] That's how I poked my eardrum out in the first place, you insensitive clod!
Kevin Smith on Prince
When the major TV broadcasters are still not bothering to get their players compatable with Vista, maybe they just aren't interested in getting everyone connected...
IMO with today's voice recognition software it shouldn't be very hard to make a problem that makes closed captions on-the-fly. A good commercial product that does this would be very good for people with hearing problems. Maybe software like this already exists, I don't know. Might be worth checking out. Then you can have closed captions with every video/youtube/thingy on the web.
My blog: http://www.redcode.nl
Not only am I moderately deaf, but my healthcare coverage (USA) is so poor that I don't have coverage for hearing aids or anything that would give me any relief. So I just have to crank the volume up and hope for the best. Youtube videos tend to have very poor audio, with a lot of background noise, so I do miss out on a lot there.
Realistically, I seriously doubt that most producers (and I'm including YouTubers in that group) are going to subtitle any video that they aren't legally required to. And I don't support any legal requirement to do so.
Basically, I think those of us that are deaf or hard of hearing are either going to have to just suck it up or find another way around the problem.
The true mark of someone who's never done something is when they say "It is cheap and easy". (The engineer in me knows that too well.)
Don't I know it! Somebody once said that to me about chewing bubble gum, and I STILL haven't gotten all that crap out of the jet's intake. All those poor monkeys, gone forever, and me out of work now!
Cheap and easy, my ass!
I hope that one day you too suffer from a genuine physical disability. That is, of course, in addition to the obvious mental disability that you suffer from now. I see also that you were not brave enough to post as anything other than AC.
Have a look at soylentnews.org for a different view
I actually think this would be most beneficial to foreign-language speakers who represent a big percentage of viewers at popular sites like YouTube.
In my case the only think I ask is for a common standard to be used by such video providers, and also to have the ability to be able to share our translations with the rest of the community.
It gets better (worse). On DVDs, Closed Captions and Subtitles are not the same thing, nor done by the same people. A series like West Wing, where seasons 6 and 7 completely forsook English subtitles, still have CC files, you just can't use a plain DVD player to select it. Your TV has to be compatible, or you're using above-average player software on your computer. (Thanks Apple! Now could you make it stop crashing?)
Personally I have both been paid and paid others to transcribe audio/video for accessible internet consumption. It's a huge effort, and the mere fact that 18 billion videos don't have it is evidence that it will never become commonplace, laws or not.
(./ prophecy captcha word: encumber)
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/09/052620 1
Someone hates these cans.
One of the great advantages a new medium has over older media is it hasn't accumulated the amount of cruft the older media have accumulated in years of special-interest pleading. One of the best ways to kill the new medium is to dump all that cruft upon it.
Nonetheless, AC is right.
Broadcasters would have never adopted Closed Captioning technology unless the government forced them to...And mforbes is banging a Libertarian socialist gavel while talking about adopting Closed Captions on web content??
Just goes to show you that the hearing impaired can be just as fucking ignorant as any Cletus T. Jigglebelly you'd see on Jerry Springer.
It would probably be even more difficult for someone who is blind.
Revver has a link under their videos going to Project ReadOn, which is a user-requested captioning system. Users first request captioning for a video and Project ReadOn assigns the video to their staff to caption it. It's what Barack Obama uses on his site.
They announced it on their blog a few weeks back.
The Ask A Ninja videos tend to be captioned, here's an example one with captioning already done, just click the closed captioning link under the video.
Heh, point taken ;)
And BTW... Whoever modded this troll go read my history WRT Solar system and digitizing humans for space travel.
He is not a troll.
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
... already has support for closed-captions.
---Point taken. But that begs the question (if YouTube IS operating illegally, for example) of whether having and enforcing such regulations would so stifle creativity that it would deny EVERYONE the advances in question.
For quite a long time, there was a void in people with disabilities using the internet. Even today, screen scrapers for braille readers really dont work well, due to nefarious HTML/CSS/javascript tricks. Considering that the meat-space USA is governed by ADA, why not US based websites? The ruling from last year only reaffirmed that net-space is NOT different than meat-space with respect to federal law.
---In other words, if you let YouTube become YouTube and then require it to add things like closed captioning, eventually everybody benefits from it. If you make it harder to be YouTube in the first place, maybe no one will ever see what it can be. I'm just thinking out loud here, and it's admittedly not really the point we're talking about. But it struck me as an interesting side point, I guess.
Can YouTube legally modify them? I would ask around to see if the DMCA exception for media aggregation (I forget the exact exception, but that DMCA exception is what allows YouTube) allows a content poster to MODIFY a copyrighted work...
I'm thinking the kind of problems one can get into is similar if a common carrier starts filtering "bad stuff". Doing that makes them liable for bad stuff that gets through.
---You're right, though, the question should be whether such laws are already on the books. I wonder, though, whether the original poster would very likely know about it if it was already law, given the fact that (if he lives in the U.S.) he lives with aspects of the Americans With Disabilities Act every day.
From what I understand, meat-space places meant for the public must follow a convoluted set of ADA guidelines. The ruling also applied that to US based websites, but I believed that also had a time frame for ADA compliance.
After reading the code and the opinions, it seems ADA would only apply if YouTube sold something, but I'm sure it could be argued.
BTW, I'm not handicapped, but I have a few friends who are, and I have designed a few ADA accessible websites.
Applied DIRECTLY to the Obama!
...whatever the particular media company that is offering the swap has on the shelf I guess. If they have porn, they could offer that. Like..hmm...retired geezers doing the transcribing..what might they want.. hmm ... MATLOCK AND GOLDEN GIRLS PORN!!1
heh heh heh
Great. Captions on YouTube videos. I can see it now...
"... and then the mentos goes in the coke bottle LOLLOLLOL!!!1111 Roxorz!"
http://www.sanctuaryforall.com/ is a site trying to see if they can make a new entertainment model to work: They produce "webisodes" (roughly 15 minuttes a piece) only for the website, its not for tv, its not for dvd's its for tv. If enough people buy it they'll make more - but... no subtitles, except some fans haved started to make their own and link to them in the forum.
You'd think that someone who tries to be inventive and use the internet as a new medium would take that in to cosideration, but apparently they can't be bothered.
(With their prices I doubt they'll last long anyway, but that's a differen story)
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
As a french-Canadian watching mostly english content, I'd like to see subtitles available on all videos. Sure, I have no problems watching things like The Simpsons, Futurama or Family Guy. However I've started watching the new Doctor Who series and sometimes it's quite hard to understand what they're saying (as in, figuring out the words spoken, not their meaning).
Subtitles would be quite useful in cases like these.
At least on The Weather Channel, closed captioning is sponsored by HeadOn, apply directly to the forehead. HeadOn, apply directly to the forehead. HeadOn, apply directly to the forehead. HeadOn is available without a prescription at retailers nationwide.
Watch any of the "featured tours" of on Adobe's CS3 programs and you'll see them use this option.
a ture_tour.html e xtended/ssi/iframe/feature_tour.html
example: http://www.adobe.com/products/flash/ssi/iframe/fe
http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/photoshop
Now whether they make it easy for others to do the same with their products, I'm not sure. I haven't seen Flash CS3's video options.
I really don't like your chances of getting CC in web content.
In terms of technology, obviously there is VideoLAN client combined with any one of the embedded (or secondary file) subtitle formats. The real issue is transcription for the subtitles. Transana is a project that can be used to help transcribe audio and video, but there is still the issue with needing people to actually do the transcription.
I've developed a system in Perl to add CC to broadcast video and I'm some kind of an expert in the field. There are many alternatives to web videos, even more than there are for broadcast, and actually there are many associations promoting web CC. At this moment you can add captions to flash videos, QT, mpeg and other formats, just do a google search or start here:
http://captions.org/
The transcriber hears the video and repeats the dialog to the speech recognition software. This is the easy way, the other is to use a stenographer machine.
Fansub seems to get it cheaper than what you describe. The solution would be to have collaborative closed captionning by fans.
QuickTime 7.2, apparently the version shipping with Leopard, supports standard analog-style 608 captions. I'd like to think that this means TV downloaded from iTunes (and iTunes U) will include the same captioning data as regular TV broadcasts (i.e. not a QuickTime text track). It may well already be there.
The blurb is here, but the rest is my speculation. I'd suggest inquiring with Apple in any case.
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
My ears are good (for now, touch wood) but I always watch movies with subs enabled, for some reason it enhances the experience (comprehension perhaps). Anywho, this is a good move - I think Adobe should just add .sub support to Flash player. Now if people would just create accessible websites.
Me lost me cookie at the disco.
it would be subtitled for free.
</sarcasm>
But seriously, trawling through the junk on YouTube it is hard to find anything worth captioning.
Deaf people can't enjoy them at all...
-j
MY boom box goes to 11!
.sig
Apparently, I was modded down by all the Libertarians who don't like having the unpolitic aspects of their crackpot politics so openly flaunted.
Yes, the True Libertarian detests the very idea that The State can mandate that he cannot discriminate against someone of African ancestry when it comes to employment.
The True Libertarian detests the very idea that The State can mandate that he cannot discriminate against someone of African ancestry when it comes to public accomodations, such as apartment rentals or even serving a meal at a lunch counter.
Libertarianism: The Scientology of modern politics.
I didn't understand the question.
Here's a decent GPL tool that produces a .srt for almost any closed captioned MPEG you throw at it:
From there it's trivial to produce what you need.
CCTV already stands for closed-circuit television, at least in Britain. No need to give it a new meaning...
What about voiceovers to describe scenes to the partially sighted? Wouldn't that only be fair, as those who are hard of hearing would be getting assistance? Then, which language would these captions be in? If they're English, doesn't that discriminate against those who aren't native speakers?
Problem I see is, as soon as you close-caption something and release it, you'll get sued for redistribution and violation of intellectual property. This happened a bit with fan-subtitled anime. They couldn't legally do it, even though no company was doing it either. The stance of the production companies was "we may someday wish to release a subtitled version ourselves for profit, therefore, any free fan-sub is ruining our potential market and causing market confusion."
How "you are ruining potential future dollars that I probably won't bother to reach anyway" translates to 'stop doing free subtitling' is debatable, but I suspect doing free closed captioning would result in the same corporate response.
A.
Captions are done with text tracks. A text file with time codes and dialog can be added to any movie with QuickTime. I don't know what the support is in MPEG-4 for this yet, but it would be done the same way, the QuickTime container and the MPEG-4 container are the same, inside you have audio track, video track, now you need a text track with dialog and time codes. The only other option would be to burn the text into the video frame by frame, but that means you can't run captions off, you can't modify the size of them later, you can't localize them, and you ruin the video encoding algorithm.
The only tools you need to caption a movie is QuickTime Pro ($29, Apple, Mac/PC) and any text editor. Both of these are already on any video-editing work station.
The text file looks something like this:
[00:00:01:22]
It's a nice day today.
[00:00:04:13]
Sure is.
[00:00:06:00]
See you later.
That is SMPTE time code (hours:minutes:seconds:frames).
However for a lot of Web video the tool chain is not professional. You can only appreciate it compared to having no video at all. If you use any Microsoft tools you are just supposed to be amazed on the rare occasions when the audio and video synchronize.
Apple - Education - QuickTime Text Tracks
Hi,
Noise reduction, or noise blocking, headphones may be an answer.
If you buy noise reduction, go for a good pair (Bose seem to get the best reviews). I tried a Bose pair on a flight and was amazed, then bought a Panasonic pair and was dissapointed.
There are also noise blocking phones that shield out a lot of background noise. Again, you get what you pay for with these.
Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated up.
There is a solution that might be the thing. It is called "Strip Mine" (http://www.zemanta.com/services/stripmine/ ) and is currently used by Slovenian National Television ( http://www.rtvslo.si/odprtikop/ ).
What this thing does is that it takes videos posted by TV network, gets CC for them that already exist (for usage in TeleText) and costructs a webpage for that particular program. The contents of the webpage are the actual CC, snapshots from the video, links to Wikipedia and other pages. One of the very nice features is the ability to include the video and a quote (similar to YouTube embed) at a certain paragraph into your blog.
Do check it out, even if you do not understand the language. http://www.rtvslo.si/odprtikop/
It was developed and is currently supported by company called Zemanta ( http://www.zemanta.com/ ).
I would imagine he has limited the amount of "the government should regulate it" comments and therefore minimized the politically charged discourse.
Quite frankly, it only incenses people that understand that the free market isn't going to solve this for everything.
After all, by the tenets of the free market, the lack of presence of these services shows that they do not meet the test of reward vs. cost. If the market for people that needed closed captioning was large enough to defray the costs of providing closed captioning, it would be more common. To ask businesses to provide closed captioning at a loss is antithetical to the core tenets of free market capitalism.
However, if you think that helping the hearing impaired be fully included in society is a worthwhile goal, then you should be able to accept government intervention in the matter. Otherwise, you're left "voting with your dollars" for a position that will never gain the critical mass to succeed. You reap what you sow.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I wonder if Microsoft's voice recognition software could do this in real time. Their software is top-notch and lets set so double the killer delete select all.
mod me funny
Harkle has a lot of stuff. They do their own captioning for some of the posted video.
Google video with captioning and the developer instructions and tools.
Here is a related article on this topic.
It never cease to amaze me how people will go through all the trouble to encode and upload a 4-9 gig mkv file and then leave the 100k of subtitles out to save a little room. Same goes for chapter stops and audio commentaries. These things are practically zero cost and are so very nice to have. These are the things that made mkv cool in the first place and was the impetus for me to finally encode all my DVDs. Come to think of it, music should be closed caption by default as well (not just have the lyrics appended to it).
CCTV? But... that would just mean communist propaganda!
YouTube should create a service allowing viewers volunteer to create caption for the video. This way, they can save money on creating closed caption. By comparing more many community provided caption to validate which caption is correct. At the end they can collect all these information to teach AI to be able to do voice recognition. 1 rock 3 birds. (community base caption = free caption service for people who has hearing problem, Sample/training for AI voice recognition, and more social interaction on video sharing)
I always thought the difficulty of separating voices from background noise was the result of poor sound editing (especially when movies are transferred to DVD).
Some of us interact with people face to face as opposed to just watching them on the TV, you know.
And, yes, I too have some minor trouble discriminating speech over background noise (not as bad as the poster of the article, though). While I rarely need to result to closed captioning to get by watching a movie, I do frequently have to ask people to repeat themselves despite having been tested as having slightly above average hearing. I can easily hear a pin drop in a quiet room, but I can't understand people talking in the front of a car from the back seat over common road noise.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I imagine there would already be a good captioning solution if we could all agree on 1 or 2 basic video formats. It drives me nuts that there are so many codecs and standards out there. All the time spent on those could have been spent on developing a single free, cross-platform video format, which scales nicely from tiny to HD, which can be streamed or downloaded, and which supports captions and any other nice features people might want.
both public and personal. In addition to being able to help point several people toward resources to help them with the same or similar problems, I also discovered that I'm apparently about to become extremely wealthy from the displaced sons and daughters of several different Nigerian dictators, who need me to help them transfer their money to the USA! -Mike
Allegedly real newspaper headline from 1998:
Man Struck by Lightning Faces Battery Charge