- From: Glenn Maynard <glenn@zewt.org>
- Date: Wed, 9 Feb 2011 20:17:22 -0500
On Tue, Feb 8, 2011 at 9:57 PM, Silvia Pfeiffer <silviapfeiffer1 at gmail.com>wrote: > Even text can amount to a substantial amount of data. Compressed http > delivery will help. Keeping the caption/subtitle tracks in separate > files and only delivering those that a user really wants helps, too. > But even then a caption file for a 2 hour video can be a fairly big > file and we want them downloaded to the browser as quickly as > possible, such that the video player is not held back from playback of > the video through still downloading the captions. So, serving billions > of caption files at as little latency as possible are both good > arguments for keeping the format dense. > Without doing a lot of sampling and just looking at an SRT for an arbitrary long movie (LOTR #1), it's 110k uncompressed, 45k deflated--that seems small enough to not cause latency problems, as long as you're only downloading the track you need. Of course, I agree that it shouldn't be necessary to actually repeat information for each cue--it makes authoring painful. (Ouch. This .SRT I downloaded at random uses commas for the decimal separator.) > Agreed. I'm happy for the previously suggested "//" at the line start > to be comments, or, for that matter, "#" or ";" or any other special > character. I would prefer not to use "/*" since it implies a "*/" is > required to end the comment. Similarly we should avoid "<!--" and > "-->" or anything else that requires a special comment end mark and > more than one or two characters. > Comment end markers aren't a major burden in HTML and CSS. Block comments allow easily commenting out sets of cues, midsentence comments within a cue (translator/editor comments), and (putting aside the --> token conflict, which will go away if the timestamp separator is changed) <!-- ... --> can be used without adding any new escapes. All of the other suggestions would also need to be escaped more frequently: // happens in URLs, and # and ; occur in plain language. > -- Glenn Maynard
Received on Wednesday, 9 February 2011 17:17:22 UTC