[whatwg] Video, Closed Captions, and Audio Description Tracks

[Henri Sivonen]

On Oct 8, 2007, at 22:52, Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis wrote:

> I'm a bit confused about why W3C's Timed Text Candidate  
> Recommendation hasn't been mentioned in this thread, especially  
> given that Flash objects are the VIDEO element's biggest  
> "competitor" and Flash CS3's closed captioning component supports  
> Timed Text. I haven't used it myself: is there some hideous  
> disadvantage of Timed Text that makes it fundamentally flawed? It  
> is appears to be designed for use both with subtitles and captions.
>
> Here's the link for the CR:
>
> http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/CR-ttaf1-dfxp-20061116/

My understanding is that the purpose of this thread isn't to find a  
captioning spec for HTML 5 but to find the right way to do closed  
captions in Ogg. Support in liboggplay and shippability in a timely  
manner are important considerations. Hence, the CMML slant so far.

Have the Annodex/Xiph developers evaluated the suitability of the W3C  
timed text format for Ogg captioning for the deaf or translation  
subtitling?

(I'm not at all an expert in this. My own experience is just what I  
can just observe about the kind of technology has served Finns well  
enough for decades for the purpose of *translation* subtitles. The  
solutions that have worked well enough are *very*, *very* feature- 
poor. The W3C spec seems a lot more complex than the simplest thing  
that could possible work if you consider that the SubRip format is  
simple and works for some definition of "works" and European TV  
subtitles work for some definition of "works". It has been suggested  
to me off-list, though, that the W3C spec embodies the right  
expertise and reinventing it should be avoided. I wonder if the W3C  
spec could be implemented incrementally so that most of the  
complexity wouldn't burden an initial implementation.)

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen at iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/