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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.
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/
Subtitles can create problems.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
it is left to the uploader to give the subtitles, as per their FAQ here, so they do support .SUB
http://googlevideo.blogspot.com/2006/09/finally-ca ption-playback.html
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.
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.
Oh, hang on...
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*wipes soda off of the screen*. What planet are you from? The reason most close caption is because they are required to by law. Most really don't care about the small segment of the marketplace. If you want proof, look at the large number of complaints about poor close captioning, and the vast majority of commercials without CC (Commercials are not required to CC by law). If the market drove companies to produce close captioning, then the commercials would be CC'd as well. Your argument does not stand up to scrutiny.
Atlas stands on the earth and carries the celestial sphere on his shoulders.
"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
Did a little googling, and it seems this kind of software already exists.
Example #1
Example #2
More links...
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