[whatwg] WebVTT feedback (was Re: Video feedback)

[Silvia Pfeiffer]

On Mon, Jun 6, 2011 at 5:30 PM, Glenn Maynard <glenn at zewt.org> wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 4, 2011 at 11:05 AM, Silvia Pfeiffer <silviapfeiffer1 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> If we introduced the scrolling behaviour that I described above where
>> cues that are rendered into the same location as a previous still
>> active cue push that previous cue up, we get this behaviour covered
>> too.
>
> I don't think so.  This is a scene with two simultaneous conversations; in
> order to help make the subtitles readable, they were authored to keep one
> conversation pair always on top, and the other always on the bottom.  Having
> captions move while they're already displayed wouldn't do this.  (I think
> it'd make it unreadable, actually, by adding motion into the mix.)

If you use explicit L: placement, we could turn off the scrolling behaviour.

I don't think your example is a typical one. In my (unmeasured)
experience, the scrolling behaviour is much more typical.

In fact, that example of yours is really really confusing to me. I
would much prefer if the text wasn't displayed on top of each other,
but at different locations on the screen - one to the right one to the
left, preferably underneath the people that speak. That is a better
experience. I believe that example of yours only looks that way
because somebody had to work around the problem that the subtitle
authoring format didn't allow for such explicit placement.


>> Eventually, we will want to get rid of the legacy format and just
>> deliver WebVTT, but they still need to display as though they came
>> from the original broadcast caption format for contractual reasons.
>
> I don't know what degree of sameness they expect, but as users can always
> override their font (implying different wrapping results, etc.), you'll
> never be able to guarantee that it'll look identical to the output of a more
> fixed format.  If captions have editing like the above, it could even result
> in a visible drop in quality.

I think the opposite is true. Right now, people work around some of
the ways in which they really would like to render their captions
because the formats don't allow for example explicit placement.
Therefore we get poor quality captions right now. With the features
available, we should see better captions, not worse.

Regards,
Silvia.