Re: Roll-up captions in WebVTT

On Tue, Nov 29, 2011 at 11:02 AM, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:
> On Tue, 29 Nov 2011, Silvia Pfeiffer wrote:
>>
>> The fact is that roll-up captions are a standard means in which TV
>> captions have been provided in the past and that publishers want these
>> replicated in exactly the same way on the Web. This is why YouTube had
>> to develop this feature, too. Since we are making WebVTT a universal
>> format in which all existing captioning from TV can be represented on
>> the Web, too, we have to support this case.
>
> WebVTT is definitely _not_ a format "in which all existing captioning from
> TV can be represented on the Web".
>
> The Web is its own medium. We shouldn't be adopting all the mistakes of
> past mediums.

We can't ignore existing video and their captions.

Also, the roll-up format is not a mistake. While it was developed for
live captioning, these captions are recorded and re-broadcast as
canned captions, too, so you can't really state that this format is
only used for live captioning.



>> Captions are a legal part of a video - if you want to present a video on
>> the Web identically to how it has been authored, we need this support,
>> otherwise it's not the same artistic object and sites run into copyright
>> issues.
>
> I don't buy that for a minute. If you can get the permission to publish
> the content in the first place, you can get the permission to publish it
> using the Web's technologies.

Only if you replicated it identically.

Silvia.

Received on Tuesday, 29 November 2011 00:23:41 UTC