Format of Captions Files

[grahamarmfield]

Have been attempting to use the player in a site where caption files are now available for the YouTube videos. Unfortunately without success.

Your documentation is clear about the caption file requirements but I believe your options are too restrictive.

I have been using Universal Subtitles (http://www.universalsubtitles.org) to add captions to the YouTube videos I'm working with. Universal Subtitles is a popular and robust tool for adding captions and can take a transcript file to speed up the production of the caption file.

Once the captions have been created it is possible to export the captions into 6 different file formats: SRT, SSA, TTML, TXT, SBV and DFXP.

Discounting the TXT format which contains no timing information, all of the remaining 5 formats contain timing codes. Two of the formats - TTML and DFXP are xml - but they all record time down to hundredths of a second which may be why they are not acceptable to the player. The TTML format (which I thought was a standard) uses 'begin' and 'dur' attributes rather than 'begin' and 'end'

SBV is the format that is native to YouTube - although YouTube will accept the TTML format too.

So at the moment I have a great tool to produce captions and a good accessible player but nothing to join them up without some considerable rework. Is it feasible that you could open up the acceptable format just a little to incorporate TTML and/or DFXP. Accepting SBV format would be good too as these can be obtained directly from YouTube for videos that already have captions.

We definitely want to support more formats for captions and this is on our roadmap going forward.

At present there are online services for converting SBV to XML etc. But we agree it would be nice if they were support by the player. Unfortunately each format needs parsing slightly differently to get the information required so there may be a select few formats we support to keep the code size down. Alternatively if there is a specific format you need to support feel free to fork us.

[grahamarmfield]

Thanks for your response.

I wasn't aware of the online tools for conversion - I may try them.

I was thinking primarily of non-technical people who may be adding captions to their videos. I believe they may like the online captioning tools like Universal Subtitles since it's easy to create a caption file visually. It's also a tool that I believe is growing in popularity - I've been at accessibility conferences and many people have mentioned it. If your player supported one of the formats that Universal Subtitles creates then users would have a completely joined up experience. The DFXP format that is created by Universal Subtitles is (I believe) so close to what you accept. I think the only difference is the inclusion of the decimal places on the seconds.

I do understand though that every extra format you support will take extra work - and what you have done so far is amazing.