Caption Online?
21 04 2006Note: I did summarize what this is all about in my video in ASL. It is about five minutes long. I hope I did okay on it. Let me know what you think after you watch this video.
As you know we already celebrated 25th anniversary with closed captioning since its 1st launched. Closed captioning is one of the biggest breakthroughs for deaf community. We all now can learn and enjoy TV shows. Believe it or not, it is not perfect at first time – it took years to become common feature everywhere.
Just keep in mind that captioning on video online is not mandatory. This is something that there’s people (NAD, congressman, etc.) are working on it and push it into law in near future. My biggest concern is that if we don’t have solution for it, then they may have slim chance to get it pass.
Personally, I have not seen any video online with captioning on desktop/laptop, ipod, PlayStation portable, cell phone, PDA, etc. In fact, someone told me there’s captioning for ipod and showed me the picture. Again, it is not exactly user friendly – you would have to hack it and install the script to make it works.
Of course, you still can view live TV on your computer or laptop with TV capture card. It works pretty good but if you want to copy or record the TV show then save it for later to watch. Caption will not work unfortunately. ATI (well known for TV capture card) acknowledged about it on their instruction manual. Maybe we should ask ATI engineering to install caption chips in it.
Let’s talk about Digital Video Recorder (DVR) and it’s getting very popular today. Some well known brand device such as TIVO and Replay TV are among first companies that offers DVR service more than five years ago. It’s no problem with captioning but till they started offering DVR with access to your computer, it is whole new ballpark.
According to TIVO forum, one of the most active posting about caption – TIVO engineers acknowledged that transfer from DVR to computer and caption got killed. They are trying to figure it out right now but one of the hacker figures it out already. But again it is not user friendly, you would need to purchase proper hardware and install scripts to make it works.
You noticed that DVD movies will work well with closed captioning (not subtitle unless it doesn’t come with it) on your computer with CyberLink PowerDVD, Intervideo WinDVD, Microsoft Media Player, Real Player and several others but not with downloadable movies or video online. Hmmm…
As far as I remember, there’s actually captioning on live streaming video online during FCC public meeting. I did get chance to watch and captioning works good. Maybe we need to find out what equipments they used to make it possible.
Do we have caption software? Yes, we do but I really don’t know much about it. Maybe I did not see/hear about it much or did not research enough on it. It would be nice if they come up solution for affordable every computer where we can watch and enjoying any videos online with captions on it.
What about Microsoft? They have Microsoft Media Center version and it is one of the hottest selling on their list right now. Does it support caption? I have no idea – maybe one of you knows if it does or not. Please let me know.
Overall, as you can see, something missing in this whole caption technology – we do need some kind of built-in caption on computer and other devices. Or maybe we do need software plugins to make possible on media players.
We still have long way to go 
Grant W Laird Jr.
http://blog.grantlairdjr.com
I await for Apple to decide to add closed caption or subtitle on new iPod with widescreen which I felt it would fit for subtitle since the current iPod size may not fit pretty.
Thank you for doing this. I appreciate your video. Please avoid using a ceiling fan with light on while using the video. What brand are you using a digital video camera?
I will try and avoid ceiling fan light next time. I use Logitech Quickcam Pro 4000. I think they now selling better one — 5000 series. Hmmm…
Thanks for your video. I think it’s time people realize how important online captioning is. All of the major media players (Windows Media Player, QuickTime, Real, Flash) support captions, but each in their own way. Luckily there is free software to make your own captions. Far from perfect, it’s a start. Please contact me because I’d like to help you get your video captioned.
Hi Grant-
I hope you don’t mind but I posted a quick closed captioned test of your
video on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6iQKerXhQ8
The video is jerky because I had to do a screen capture to get it into
QuickTime. The captions are at the top because I didn’t want to cover your
hands. The typeface is large because YouTube tends to make video a little
blurry and I wanted to make sure the captions would be legible.
Anyway, it’s an example to work from. It really doesn’t take much too much
skill, just a little practice with MAGpie and a copy of QuickTime Pro.
James
—–Original Message—–
From: Grant W Laird Jr [mailto:grant@crazytech.com]
Sent: Thursday, June 22, 2006 11:55 AM
To: jshort@harkle.com
Subject: Re: [Grant W. Laird, Jr. Blog] Comment: “Caption Online?”
James,
Sure! Can you give me website address where it show how to make one?
I am sure we can do it with Nero or Ulead software but its require alot
of work….
Hmmm
There is a nice MAGpie tutorial available at http://streaming.wisconsin.edu/accessibility/magpie_tutorial/index.html and it has instructions on where you can download MAGpie for free.
QuickTime Pro is one strategy for preparing your captioned video to upload to free video sites like YouTube or Google Video. When you’re ready, contact me and I’ll walk you through it.
James,
I just got QuickTime Pro recently and I will install sometime this week — this way I will do the procedure how you made it. Also, I performed little experiment with “subtitle” on my “dogs in pool” video. I mastered how to do that with Ulead VideoStudio 10. I realized that I should have prepared transcript first thing otherwise you will keep going back and forth. It is time consuming.
Before I begin, I need to see what you created caption for my video recently. (Youtube) Can you e-mail me “transcript” for it? This way I will get the idea. Does it comes in space for each comment or sentence and do you create transcript on notepad or Word?
Thanks for heading up.
gwlj
Let’s start with the creating captions in MAGpie. I think you’ll find MAGpie much faster than Ulead. I’ll admit, MAGpie is a little quirky but with practice you’ll get used to it. We’ll get to the YouTube step later.
The first thing to do is to install MAGpie 2 from http://ncam.wgbh.org/webaccess/magpie/. Follow the installation instructions closely and you should have no problem getting it running on your machine. The tutorial from the University of Wisconsin that I mentioned earlier is a great resource.
Once you have MAGpie running, you’ll need two things: caption text and a source movie. For the text, use any text editor MS Word, WordPad, etc.), but you have to save the file in .txt format.
You’ll use your text editor
to break up your transcript
into two-line captions
32 characters long or fewer.
This is a skill
developed over time.
A great resource for making good readable captions is from the Captioned Media Program at http://www.cfv.org/caai/nadh7.pdf .
So now you have a .txt file. Next you need your video. When working with MAGpie, I prefer using QuickTime compatible movies. So if you haven’t already, export your video from Ulead using the MPEG-4 format.
Now you can follow the Wisconsin tutorial to create your first project. I’ll also email you a .magpie file that already has the text imported into it. You’ll have to relink the video in MAGpie by using “File: Properties: Base Media.” Also in Properties, you’ll see settings for text properties. For YouTube, I suggest setting the font to Arial size to 16.
Play around with MAGpie. One trick I use for timing is to wait a half second before pressing F9 for each caption. I then select all the caption rows and use “Captions: Offset time of selected rows” and subtract a half second. This probably doesn’t make any sense now but it will later.
Let me know when you’re ready and I’ll walk you through the steps for preparing your captined video for YouTube.
Actually, Google Video has started having some videos that you can watch by clicking on “CC” at the bottom where all the other functional buttons would be. The only drawback, there’s a few “selected” videos that you can watch with CC. Hopefully, this will become common in the near future…
[...] Finally, NAD has already made comment about it. See it for yourself, click here. Many companies do read our blog site these days. You have to understand that Netflix is not alone. There are many other services that are not offering same thing. [...]
Thank you for your blog to bring closed captioning to the attention of as
many companies as possible. I am hounding Netflix about this. I understand
that they are not required to provide this or even note on what films it is
available. I find their labelling untrustworthy and have missed many good
films which may have been captioned tho they weren’t labelled so. I have
watched mystery series on PBS and A&E which were captioned but don’t say
so on Netflix. Maybe they are but I hesitate to risk it. We are getting tired
of old foreign films!! Thanks again for your good work!
We have developed a new workflow for creating captions for Quicktime. It requires no re-compression.
This means that it’s possible to dynamically add captions to already purchased audio/video content via iTunes.
Below is a link to some samples of our new technology for audio/video Podcast with Closed-Captioning. Please make sure you have the latest version of iTunes.
http://www.multimediatest.com/Site/ Press “Subscribe” to download the podcast samples and how-to video.
Contact me if you have any questions.
Kind regards,
Giovanni Galvez