RE: Support for advanced caption features (inc rollup)

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?

In that case (assuming that it doesn't meet the regs), a complain would be filed against ABC for the content not meeting the regs.  ABC would need to demonstrate that it did its part.  If it chose to use a "safe harbor" caption format to distribute the caption data (e.g. SMPTE-TT) and weren't involved in offering an application that needed to parse and display the data then they'd be regarded as doing their part and wouldn't incur fines.  If they provided the video and provided the application that rendered the captions incorrectly, then they should expect to be fined.

> And that's where the browsers come in.
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've got to call reductio ad absurdum on that.

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).

Whether you think it is sensible or not, this is in the books.

Received on Wednesday, 12 December 2012 03:17:42 UTC