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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?"
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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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.
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).
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Then there is the the fact that less than half of the world population speaks English. These kinds of community driven subtitling projects are the best way to reach all the different language groups. To address the "ask slashdot" question I think we need players that support third party subtitles, then we can work on building communities to provide the content. This is a rapidly growing area on the internet. My favourite right now being subscene.
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The problem I think starts at the mastering. For some reason or other, the person at the mixing panel decides that some SFX has to be REALLY LOUD, and of course, there's some conversation going on or another. Well, the sound effect ends up masking the dialog! (Probably through the same effect that makes things like MP3 possible). Oh great, now what did the guy say?
Then when movies get broadcasted on TV, they get mixed down, making the effect even worse. Or heck, even TV programs do the same - they overlay SFX or canned laughing or other stuff that masks the dialog. Or if it isn't masked, it covers some syllable making you do a double-take (did they just say what I thought they said?).
I have pretty good hearing as well - but I have closed captioning on all the time - at least I can read what I just missed or figure out what they just said. The fact that A/V receivers and DVD players come with "dialog clarifiers" should be indication enough that perhaps people want to understand dialog.
YouTube and the like videos are even worse - there's often so much background noise that even normal conversation levels are hard to make out over the buzz. Properly done YouTube videos often re-mix the audio afterwards, but they're the minority. The rest are either echos or the guy speaking (muffling voices even more over the background hum), or talking just barely louder than the noise level.
No the lion's share is timing the text to the actual audio/things going on on-screen, while also editing the text, so the chunks of displayed text can be read in time. There's no point of capturing/displaying exactly everything that is being said, because most of the time nobody is going to be able to read along that quickly and still get a grasp of what it's all about.
It's basically like subtitling, you just leave out the translation part. This is a lot of work, and unless there are already plans to subtitle/localize the program into other languages, I don't know whether anybody would really do this.
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1. Never tell everything you know.
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").