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

[Maik Merten]

Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis schrieb:
> 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/

Actually I wonder if it wouldn't make sense to have an attribute for
media elements specifying a URI for a file containing Timed Text. These
externally stored (not embedded in a media file) captions would be
codec-agnostic and could be used to reuse the very same set of captions
for e.g. differently encoded media (Ogg, MPEG,
Generic-Codec-Of-The-Season, ...).


As a side note I like the idea of captions which are more than just the
usual stream text. Imagine a newsreel with timed "Would you like to know
more?" links. Given that HTML5 is usually viewed in browsers that
implement at least a non-empty subset of HTML I imagine it should be
possible for the browser to layer something div-equivalent over the
media elements supporting captioning and pipe the HTML captions into it
(with caution, imagine a caption itself recursively embedding a video).


Maik Merten