- From: Silvia Pfeiffer <silviapfeiffer1@gmail.com>
- Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2011 22:30:06 +1100
On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 9:27 PM, timeless <timeless at gmail.com> wrote: > On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 10:23 AM, Kevin Marks <kevinmarks at gmail.com> wrote: >> Moving them only within the video viewport is a bug, not a feature. > > Of note, the big tv we had in 2000 (probably purchased circa 1998) at > a college communal area would display captions for the PIP window > below the PIP. So even TV vendors were aware that they didn't need to > always stick captions into the box once they had reasonable > resolution. > > Sadly I don't think I've ever seen any TVs which would shrink the > primary window just to supply space for captions. There's no reason > they couldn't, since they also do shrink the window to provide > onscreen menus or program guides. > > I suppose part of the reason with big TVs is an assumption that the > audience will be at a fixed distance with or without captions, but > shrinking the view area for the programming would cause the preferred > distance to decrease. And as content providers actually do try to pick > areas which are mostly dead, the tradeoff of losing "live pixels" vs > decreasing optimal distance was not considered worth it. > >> Classic >> TV required this (especially with overscan), but on modern TV's there is >> often a letterbox or pillarbox are that captions should go in. > > Indeed. I'm pretty sure I saw a DVD playes which took advantage of > this with a letterbox and stuck the captions below the movie in > January when I was in California. IIUC, the YouTube's captions can be moved within the whole video viewport which includes any letterboxing or pillarboxing if available. As for moving them outside - that would turn the whole web page into a potential drop zone for a div (or similar) coming from within a media element. That would probably not make that much sense. But I could imagine an application defining certain areas around the video - in particular below and above it - as drop zones for captions/subtitles and thus extend the on-screen space. I wonder what the browser vendors think about that feature. Cheers, Silvia. >> On a >> decent-sized computer screen, there is no real excuse for obscuring the >> video with the captions rather than putting them underneath or alongside. > > Yep. Well, it wouldn't be wrong for someone to write a 'Misery > compatibility mode' application to enable people to see how their > captions would look on old TVs, but I don't think that's something for > which primary applications should be designed. >
Received on Wednesday, 16 February 2011 03:30:06 UTC