RE: iOS6 WebVTT TextTrack Support in Safari

thanks john. for this to work, the native video player would either need to handle the webVTT parsing/rendering, or allow the browser to render over the video. i was REALLY hoping that apple would suppport this in iOS6 for safari/iPhone.

our only other alternatives are to re-encode video with embedded 608 captions in the H.264 essence (for HLS), or modify our HLS to use the new webVTT subtitle tracks. both of these approaches are burdensome - we really would prefer the simple/elegent solution of the HTML5 text track.

hoping david or someone from Apple can wiegh in here...

-glenn



Glenn Goldstein | Vice President, Media Technology Strategy | VIACOM
glenng@mtvi.com | 212-846-3210 | 1515 Broadway, New York NY 10036

-----Original Message-----
From: John Foliot [mailto:john@foliot.ca] 
Sent: Wednesday, September 26, 2012 2:55 PM
To: Goldstein, Glenn; public-texttracks@w3.org
Subject: RE: iOS6 WebVTT TextTrack Support in Safari

Goldstein, Glenn wrote:
>
> does anyone know if iOS6 safari has text track support for webVTT on 
> iPhone?
>
> my simple tests that work in Chrome Canary are not rendering webVTT on 
> iOS6.
 
Hi Glenn,

As far as I can recall, this might be an open issue for mobile delivery (both iOS as well as Android and possibly others). I believe the issue is in managing 2 data-streams concurrently on the mobile devices (bandwidth and processing), which hand off video to the native video players on the hand-helds, and do not use the web browser like on the desktop experience.

I am unaware of a proposed solution at this time short of burned-in captions, coupled with some server-side sniffing (or maybe media-queries?) to deliver the correct media file to the hand-held device(s) - but happy to be schooled otherwise.

JF
---------------
John Foliot
Web Accessibility Specialist
Co-Facilitator, W3C HTML5 Accessibility Task Force (Media) Co-Founder, Open Web Camp

Received on Wednesday, 26 September 2012 19:10:59 UTC