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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.
Subtitles can create problems.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
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.
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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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.
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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.
Your statement that the captionign is "cheap and easy" is not at all correct. As someone who works in education where captions are often required to be added to material that wasn't previously captioned, I can tell you that it is a major PITA to get this done. First you have to send the video to a transcriber, who generally charges about $15/hour (their hours, not running time hours). If the material is highly technical or specialized, than somebody who is a subject matter expert needs to proofread the transcript for accuracy and spelling of terminology, etc. There exists NO MAGIC BULLET for this work. The best computer voice-to-text program (Dragon Naturally Speaking) is only 95% accurate when recognizing text from a voice to which it is trained with no background noise or music - so you can't just feed a video to it, which would result in complete gibberish.
Next the transcript needs to be broken up into phrases and sentences for the screen using natural cadence (can't be done by computer automatically) and then the resulting captions need to be synchronized to the video - basically creating time stamps for each caption bit which are then turned into a caption track able to be read by a computer media player like Real, Quicktime or Flash.
This is very labor intensive work. It's basically costing around $100/hour of video to do right now, and that's prohibitive in the public education system where resources are scarce - and there's the question of whose responsiblity it is to pay for it and have it done, not to mention intellectual property issues wherein a caption or transcript is being publicly released for a video obtained from a copyright owner - legally the transcript belongs to the owner!
So don't tell me this is cheap or easy unless you're willing to come do it at my college, cheapy and easily.
Video codecs don't, because it's not part of the video. Most container formats allow a subtitle track, and there are also some formats for including a subtitles in separate files. Subtitles are basically text with a small amount of markup (often none, sometimes colours for different speakers) in a stream with timestamps. It's up to the player to display them at the correct time. VLC manages it, I've not tried others.
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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.
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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.
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
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.
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").