Re: Systematic access to media/plugin metadata

On Wed, Apr 13, 2011 at 4:51 AM, Eric Carlson <eric.carlson@apple.com> wrote:
>
> On Apr 12, 2011, at 10:42 AM, Laura Carlson wrote:
>
>> Hi Eric,
>>
>> On 4/12/11, Eric Carlson <eric.carlson@apple.com> wrote:
>>> Laura -
>>>
>>> On Apr 12, 2011, at 10:14 AM, Laura Carlson wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>> Silvia, maybe accessing video and audio transcripts would be a another
>>>> use case to add. I don't know. Would that be applicable? Transcripts
>>>> may be embedded in a video but when people are on a dialup modem, (I
>>>> am a majority of the time), they have no way to obtain that transcript
>>>> unless the author remembers to supply a link to the transcript in the
>>>> body of the document. In this use case they are locked out of all
>>>> video content.
>>>>
>>>  Textual transcripts embedded in a video file are available to script
>>> though the Track API [1].
>>
>> 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" 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, 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.


My thoughts for a transcript is through a separate file that contains
substantially both, the content of a caption track and an audio
description track. But since that doesn't need to be time-aligned as
the users won't watch it together with the video/audio, a separate
file or section on the page makes more sense.

I will be proposing a consistent solution for text alternatives for
audio and video soon - I'm working on a proposal.

Cheers,
Silvia.

Received on Wednesday, 13 April 2011 01:38:43 UTC