Re: Systematic access to media/plugin metadata

Hi Eric,

Thank you for your reply.

>> How does the end user obtain the transcripts if there is no script?
>>
>  They can't, but as far as I know there is no standard way to mark a text
> track in an audio or video file as a "transcript"

Maybe there should be?

> so a script with
> hard-coded knowledge about the contents of such a movie will be required for
> this anyway.
>
>  In any case all of the samples in a media file are typically intermixed,
> eg. a text track will be broken up into small chunks and spread throughout
> the file. This means that it isn't usually possible to load only a text
> track,

So are you saying that most captions are not  just a text file with
time stamps? Is that correct?

> and in your example of a user with a slow network connection it will
> be necessary to download the entire video file even if they only want the
> transcript.

Downloading an entire video file would not be an option for a user on
a slow connection. Just starting a video grinds everything to a halt.

When I asked Silvia for a transcript of her WebVTT explained Video
[1]. She kindly linked to
a full transcript of the described video in the form of a WebVTT file
[2]. That worked. Is there anyway that transcripts like this could be
extracted and offered to users on slow connections automatically?

Eric, what do you think is the answer for this use case?

Best Regards,
Laura
P.S. Silvia, I was unsuccessful in obtaining the transcript via
YouTube. So thanks again for providing an explicit link on your site.

[1] http://blog.gingertech.net/2011/03/29/webvtt-explained/
[2] http://blog.gingertech.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/transcript.vtt
-- 
Laura L. Carlson

Received on Tuesday, 12 April 2011 19:20:50 UTC