Re: Support for advanced caption features (inc rollup)

On Tue, 11 Dec 2012, Christian Vogler wrote:
> 
> Basically it says: if you distribute TV programming on the Internet, you 
> must also send the closed captions, and the software or hardware that 
> you provide to users for viewing your programming must display those 
> captions.

Publishers don't generally provide such software. Who's to blame if ABC 
puts a WebM and VTT file pair on the Internet, Jane Doe creates a Web page 
with <video> elements pointing to it, and the user runs Opera to read it, 
and the captions don't show? Who should the user sue? On what grounds?


> Section 203 is the equivalent of TVs supporting the display of closed 
> captions. The intent (and a very powerful one at that) is that any 
> device or software distributed with hardware that is capable of playing 
> back video programming must support the rendering of closed captions.

Every turing machine with a radio is "capable of playing back video 
programming". Such a requirement would be absurd. Either this requirement 
doesn't say that, or it is so overly broad that no court would support it 
as written.


> And that's where the browsers come in.

The requirement only extends as far as TV programming on the Web. If I 
film my cats and put them online and then someone uses Firefox to watch 
the video, nothing here applies to us, as there's no TV programming.

My network router is capable of playing back video -- I could SSH into it 
and upload a script that downloads MPEG4 files of TV shows and then 
converts them to ASCII animations played back over SSH. Does that mean 
that my router's manufacturer has to implement scrolling captions?

I think you're making a leap that isn't justified by the text you're 
citing. There are specific situations where the text requires captions 
supported in specific ways, but it isn't at all clear to me that all 
browsers are affected by these regulations, since not all browser vendors 
find themselves in those situations.

I think in practice it might be better to just have the browsers that feel 
they need to follow these regulations implement straight 608 captions 
(that is, just a binary file consisting of the raw caption byte pairs, or 
maybe binary files in the 708 wrapper), and the people who want to put out 
TV programming on the Web include 608 captions, and then for the 608 
captions to be entirely ignored by everyone, with the "real" captions 
transmitted in VTT in a layout optimised for the Web. Then the regulations 
are satisfied, and yet we can still get on with doing sensible stuff on 
the Web (rather than worrying about whether we have to support "serif 
monospace" or text with sunken edges or scrolling captions).

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Wednesday, 12 December 2012 00:34:40 UTC