[whatwg] Discussing WebSRT and alternatives/improvements

[timeless]

On 8/24/10, Henri Sivonen <hsivonen at iki.fi> wrote:
> How often do captions distinguish two or more speakers in the same cue by
> styling them differently? In my experience, translation subtitles for TV,
> DVDs and theatrical movies virtually never do (but it's assumed that the
> reader of the subtitles can work out who is talking from the sound track, so
> I can see why this might not generalize to captioning for the deaf).

BBC/CNN tend to. - BBC will switch from Cyan to Yellow.

>From memory speakers in the US market where captioning is more
important will at least have labels.

Daytime soaps would (even Latin American Spanish) position text near speakers.

In the US we also had text which was italicized to indicate certain things.

I'm entirely unimpressed by captioning in Finnish TV, other than their
best efforts to burn over the extant content instead of properly using
TV support for captions.

Sadly I've been a victim of the Finnish TV market for more than 4
years so my meory of the US mark is aged (possibly romanticized). My
experience with BBC is from my current vacation.

I can't speak to DVDs as I haven't watched my collection. However if
people would like, I believle I could arrange screenings in Helsinki
of perhaps 200 region 1/2 disks (mostly popular titles, typically
American films including some classics).

In the states I had a Karaoke app more than 10 years ago, I doubt I
could find it easily.

I don't have experience w/ modern web based captions. I did have some
experience w/ Japanese Anime (as a viewer circa 2000), but no
collection.