Closed Captioning In Web Video? 164
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 (Score:3, Informative)
dotSUB (Score:5, Informative)
http://dotsub.com/ [dotsub.com]
Re:It absolutely sucks for deaf people (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Closed Captions online are awesome (Score:5, Informative)
OpenCaptions.com (Score:5, Informative)
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 [opencaptions.com] page:
Re:Laws (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Laws (Score:3, Informative)
Revver uses Project ReadOn (Score:2, Informative)
They announced it on their blog [revver.com] a few weeks back.
The Ask A Ninja videos tend to be captioned, here's an example one with captioning already done [revver.com], just click the closed captioning link under the video.
Re:dotSUB (Score:3, Informative)
here's [dotsub.com] a rocketboom on dotsub about dotsub and how it works.
Re:What about quality control? (Score:1, Informative)
When sentences trail off into garbage characters, it's not because the captioning is bad but because the video signal from which the captions are being decoded (line 21 of the NTSC broadcast specification) isn't good enough to decode the captions clearly. The failure could occur because the satellite signal isn't good enough, or even if the caption feed has interference before it is injected into the cable broadcasting system, which would explain why you might see a clear picture but garbled captions sometime.