: Hello everyone. I am Marisol Miranda from EASI,
Equal Access to Software Information. And I want to welcome
everyone to these webinars on on-line captions, captioning
with MAGpie. Our -- today's presenter is Geoff Freed. Hi,
Geoff. And now I am going to turn the mic over to Norm
Coombs. Hi Norm.
: Hi Marisol. Hi everyone. It is good to have
everybody here with us. We have a crowd and I know there is
still some more coming. So we are looking forward to a good
presentation. I know Geoff has a whole bunch of slides so I
am not going to take much time with introductions. But we
do have some other interesting webinars coming up. We have
one Monday, two-hour webinar on rule making for Section 508,
which is very interesting.
And then we got a couple of webinars in June. One on
Daisy. And one on a new tool to make accessible PDF. And
we have a on-line course for the month of June, which
Marisol is teaching. Teaching the standards for the web
accessibility initiative on web design, Web Content
Accessible Guidelines version 2.
So I don't want to take anymore time. I want to turn
it over to Geoff. And I will sit back. And I know I'm
going to learn something. Thank you for coming, Geoff. And
it is all yours.
: Thanks Norm. And hi everybody. This is Geoff
Freed from the National Center for Accessible Media at the
WGBH Educational Foundation in Boston. And I would first
ask if -- I am assuming people can hear me. If you cannot
hear me, or if I am too loud, just type a message into the
text box so I can see it and make adjustments as necessary.
What I would like to do today with my hour is talk
about MAGpie, which we re-released not too long ago with
some improvements and some fixes. And since it's frankly a
little difficult to talk about MAGpie for a whole hour
without talking about captions in general and what captions
are doing on the web these days, I thought that I would take
some time at the beginning of this session to talk a bit
about the state of captions on-line, what is happening with
captions on the web. We will talk a little bit about
caption formats.
And of course, I always like to take questions. So
unless Norm objects, I think what I would like to do is just
ask people if you have questions, type them into the text
box and I'll see them. And I will answer them as they come
in or as I can fit them in, but I'm always happy to answer
questions.
And I see we have, frankly, an enormous crowd here. So
it is good to have you all here. Why don't I get started.
Just very briefly, a little bit about NCAM. The National
Center for Accessible Media is part of the Media Access
Group, at the WGBH Educational Foundation in Boston. That
is the same WGBH that you see on public TV and hear on
public radio.
We are a research and development arm of the Media
Access Group. Also in the Media Access Group, we have the
Caption Center which is the oldest captioning agency in the
world, founded in the early '70s. And DVS, Descriptive
Video Service, the happy people that bring you audio and
video descriptions for programming on PBS, Turner Classic
Movies, in movie theaters, on DVD, formally on VHS as well.
We are all part of the Media Access Group. And here at
NCAM, I am in charge of the web accessibility and
multi-media accessibility projects and am one of the
co-developers of MAGpie when we released it initially about
ten years ago, as well as the second version. I am involved
in a lot of standards work, in a lot of policy work as well.
So, why don't we move ahead. You can go ahead and go
to the next slide. I'm not seeing it. There we go. Okay.
Let's start just briefly by going over what captions are,
what they are for, what they do. Just so we are all talking
about the same thing.
Captions are a visual representation of the -- of the
program audio or the audio track. They are always in the
same language as the audio of the program. They indicate
not just what's being said, but other important non-speech
information. By non-speech we are talking about sound
effects, music, laughter, speaker identification, off screen
effects, things like that help people who are deaf or hard
of hearing, fully understand what their hearing peers are
getting in the sound track.
Captions are, for the most part, synchronized to appear
along with what's being spoken. And they can be displayed
in pop-on or roll-up styles. Pop-on captions are the
captions that appear in little blocks sort of like
subtitles. And roll-up is what you see for a lot of live
programming where the caption display scrolls from the
bottom to the top in two or three row groups.
Can you hit the next slide?
Here in North America, we call the captions, we call
them captions. In other countries, captions are often
referred to as subtitles, which can be confusing because
here in North Americans subtitles are
foreign-language-subtitles. So I will be talking about
captions as captions. Foreign-language subtitles are not
the same thing as captions; although they are often
confused.
As I said earlier, captions contain not just
information about what is being said, but other non-speech
information as well, subtitles do not. In short, captions
are for deaf and hard-of-hearing people. Subtitles are for
hearing people. Subtitles are a translation of the audio
into another language. They do not typically contain non
speech information. They are simply a translation of what's
being said.
Okay. Next slide.
Captions can be closed or open. Closed captions have
to be turned on by the viewer or they can be turned on or
off by the user, typically by an on-screen button or switch,
depending on the player. You can also turn them on or off
from a menu option. We are going to be seeing pictures of
this in just a little bit.
Open captions on the other hand, everybody sees them.
They are -- effectively, you can say they are burned into
the video. You can't turn them off. Everybody sees them
whether or not they want to see them.
Various multi media players such as those made by
Apple, RealPlayer, Flash players, Windows Media player and
several others all provide a mechanisms for turning captions
on and off whether or not it is immediate obvious or you
have to dig for it, all of these multi media players provide
such a thing.
And depending on the player or the format of the video,
text format that you are using and the player that you are
using to play these items back, you, as an author, can
provide an on-screen control, a custom control for toggling
the captions on and off.
Okay. Next slide.
I'm almost always asked what about transcripts instead
of captions. Can I just use a transcript? And the answer
is it is best not to use a transcript alone. A transcript
is a natural by-product of the captioning process. The
first thing you do when you create captions, either before
the program airs or while the program is airing, you are
creating a transcript.
Transcripts are useful for searching. They are useful
for quickly scanning the audio track effectively in a visual
manner, but transcripts are typically not synchronized.
They don't provide visual information. And they really
should not be considered a replacement for captions. They
are often a good supplement.
And I always recommend that if you are providing
captions, it is a good idea to provide the link for captions
as well. But they are not to be considered a replacement
for captions.
Okay. Next.
All right. What we have on the screen right now, are a
few views of captions in the QuickTime player. I would like
to just spend a few minutes reviewing what captions can look
like, depending on the media player that we are talking
about. And in all examples, except for I think one, these
captions have been created with MAGpie. And we will talk
about how these are created in just a little bit.
So on the screen, we have three views of captions
playing in the QuickTime player. In one view, we have
captions, white text over a black region, a caption region.
In another one, we have yellow text over a translucent
region, meaning you can sort of see through the background.
And then we have in the third view we have captions playing
over what is called a transparent region, meaning there is
no black box or semi-opaque box. It is just text right over
the video. Just like you would see with foreign language
subtitles.
So these are some ways that captions are presented on
the web. Most of us have probably seen the first case,
which is white letters on a black box in most web
presentations of captions.
Okay. Next slide.
And here, we've got another view of captions in the
QuickTime player using a different format. That previous
slide showed captions in a particular format for Apple
called QTtext. We will talk more about these formats in a
bit. But in this view, we are seeing captions in another
format that is used by Apple devices stationary and mobile
devices in a format called SCC, Scenarist Closed Caption.
And SCC captions look a lot like the old line 21 captions
that we all grew up with in the old analog world.
The good thing about SCC Captions is that in Apple's
implementations, you can turn these captions on and off in a
number of ways. On the screen I am showing the SCC captions
and the view of the menu. In the view menu, there is a
choice for show or hide closed captions, which is shown over
on the right.
Okay. Next slide.
Here we've got a view of captions shown on some mobile
Apple devices, the iPhone, and the iPod touch on the left.
And on the right, an iPod Nano. You can see that the
captions look basically the same as what we just saw in the
QuickTime player. These are SCC captions again playable on
Apple devices.
If you look closely, if you can see the screen, if you
look closely, you can see that the presentation of the
captions is actually a little bit different between the
iPhone and the iPod Nano -- this is just a curiosity that I
find interesting -- that the captions on the left are
displayed in a box with very sharp edges in a font that has
Serifs. And in the right the captions are displayed in a
box with round edges, not sharp. And they have a Sans Serif
font.
Now, this is just a divergence in how these two devices
decode the captions. How the captions look is up to the
device, not up to the author in this case. And in this
case, the guys at Apple who created the iPod Nanos
implementation of caption and the people at Apple who
created the iPhone, and the iPod touch and the iPad
implementation, I don't think spoke to each other because
they both came up with different approaches. But in the
end, the result is the same. You still see the text. Okay,
next.
Here we've got a view of iTunes showing captions.
Again, these are SCC captions. In iTunes you can turn the
captions on and off in a couple of ways. One way is up in
the controls menu. I have a picture of this up on the
screen. Under the controls menu there is a choice for audio
and subtitles. And then below that, there is a toggle that
will say hide or show closed captions depending on if they
are on or off.
Next please. Can you go back one? I think you went
forward two. There we go. Thanks.
And here is another view of iTunes where instead of
using the menu to display a caption control, all you have to
do is roll the pointer over the video viewer in iTunes and a
little controller will pop up on the bottom or anywhere.
You can drag it around the screen but in this picture it is
on the bottom. And there is a little balloon on the right
side of that controller. If you click on the balloon, click
it once with the mouse, not from the keyboard, a context
menu will pop up that will say hide or show captions.
Incidentally, if you are in the habit of including
foreign language subtitles in your iTunes movies, clicking
on that balloon will also pop up choices for turning on the
subtitle tracks. And if you've included audio descriptions
and tagged them with the right metadata in the wrapper, in
the [Inaudible] wrapper you will also get a context menu
showing what audio description tracks or audio tracks are
available. That is for another EASI session, I think.
Okay. Next.
Here we have continuing our traversal through
multimedia players, here we have a couple of screen shots of
captions in the RealPlayer. Not too many people use the
RealPlayer, I think, anymore, but I wanted to include it
anyway. There are captions in the left view. Captions over
a black field. And in the right view, captions over a
transparent region. So they have nothing behind them.
Okay. Next slide.
And here are captions using Windows Media player in a
format that is no longer supported by Microsoft, but has had
a surprisingly long life. People are still using this.
This is a format called SAMI, S-A-M-I. It's only playable
in Windows Media Player. It is a closed-caption format. So
using Windows Media Player you can turn the captions on and
off.
They are always positioned in the Windows Media Player
in a region directly below the video region. So on the
screen, we have a picture of Arthur. And in the black
region below that, we have the captions. As I said, SAMI is
no longer supported by Microsoft. It is still supported by
the Windows Media Player. There aren't any improvements
being made for it. And at some point, support for SAMI will
disappear in Windows Media Player, but I cannot say when.
Okay. Next.
All right. Before we talk about Flash, I just want to
remind people if you have questions be sure to type them
into the box and I will see them.
When it comes to Flash captions, things change. Flash
players are not like other multimedia players, unlike the
QuickTime player or Windows Media Player, every Flash player
is different because it is created by -- you create it if
you are a Flash author, you create it yourself. There is no
default Flash players. So every Flash player is different,
but you can still include captions in Flash players.
So there are two ways to do this. And we will talk
more about this in just a minute. But Adobe provides a
captioning component. And MCAM also provides a captioning
component, called CCforFlash, which is free.
We also have a prebuilt Flash player called CC player,
which is what's on the screen now, also for free. We will
talk a little bit more about that after we talk about
MAGpie. But the point is that with CC for Flash or with a
custom built Flash player, you can provide a button on the
screen to turn the captions on and off.
And then the picture that you see on the screen now
there is a little button called CC with an arrow pointed to
it. If this were an active video, we can press that button
and the captions would disappear. Press it again, and the
captions would reappear.
In Flash implementations, captions are usually used in
the DFXP or now TTML for Timed Text Markup Language format.
We will talk more about formats in just a minute.
Okay. Next.
Somebody is asking is the CC button keyboard
accessible. Yes, in fact it is keyboard accessible. And in
fact, every button on that CC player interface is not only
keyboard accessible, but screener accessible. We designed
CC player, and CC for Flash to provide accessible controls
for both keyboard only users and screen reader users.
So if you are using a screen reader and you are moving
through CC player, each button has a name, stop, play,
forward, back, volume, captions on, captions off. Even the
on-screen instructions are accessible by a keyboard and
screen reader.
On the screen now, we have something that is relatively
new. We have closed captions playing in a BlackBerry
smartphone. This is a new feature that RIM, research and
motion released just a few months ago on only a few
smartphones for the time being. The Bold 9700, the Storm 2,
and the BlackBerry Curve 8530. If you have one of those
phones, your media player can actually decode closed
captions in a format called TTXT, TTXT.
And this is one of the new features of MAGpie, where
MAGpie can export TTXT files, and not only export the files,
but also combine them with a video in a process called
muxing. So that it will effectively give you the caption
file and give you a captioned movie, which you can then put
on your BlackBerry smartphone or transmit to your phone.
We will talk more about that capability in a minute but
the good news is that here is another platform for captioned
videos.
Somebody is asking is there a single caption format
that all major players, Windows Media, QuickTime, YouTube
can display? Wouldn't that be a wonderful thing. Right
now, the answer is no. Windows Media likes SAMI. QuickTime
likes QTtext or SCC. YouTube likes a number of formats,
DFXP, QTtext, RealText, SRT, a couple of others.
One format in particular, DFXP, which is a
nonproprietary format from the W3C, which is finished and is
waiting final approval from the W3C was created with that
goal in mind that you are talking about, having a single
format that everyone could use that is nonproprietary.
There are some players that are going to be adopting it.
As I said earlier, Flash, when you are creating
captions for Flash you use DFXP. Some on-line video sites
are using DFXP already. MTV springs to mind immediately.
But right now I can't say to you that there is one format
that every player will play. That has not happened yet.
Okay. Next slide.
Somebody is asking about muxing, I think. Yes, muxing
M-U-X-I-N-G is a shorthand term for combining tracks
together. So taking a text track and interleaving it
effectively in with the video data is one way to think of
it.
Okay. On this screen now, while we are talking about
BlackBerry devices is just a series of pictures of the menus
that are available on these Blackberry phones that give you
some options for how the captions look. You can turn them
on and off. Obviously, you can change the text size to be
small, medium, and large. And a few gradations in between.
You could also reposition them yourself. If you don't
like them at the bottom, which is the default, you can move
them to the top, to the left, to the right, and both the top
and the bottom.
So they've provided a number of very nice options for
customization.
Okay. Next.
And then finally on-line closed captions are beginning
to appear with some frequency on a number of very popular
websites. ABC, Hulu, Hulu desk top if you use that, has a
nice implementation. Hulu, actually, just upgraded their
implementation of captions. MTV uses them, NBC.com,
Netflix, many of you probably heard about a month ago
announced that they are now supporting captions on their
instant play player on Windows. Not yet on the IPad or on
other portable devices, but Windows and Mac.
YouTube, obviously. I am sure we have all had
experience with YouTube captions. And some others.
Okay. Next.
The good news is that captions are spreading. One of
the reasons that captions are spreading is not just because
of the obvious uses by deaf and hard-of-hearing people, or
hearing people in noisy environments, but captions provide a
good way to do search. And search is a big deal. And
captions provide a good mechanisms for searching through
videos.
So how do you create your own captions. We like to say
you create them with MAGpie which is a free application that
we initially released about ten years ago. We are now in
version 2.5.1, Windows. MAGpie creates captions that can be
integrated into a number of -- that can be exported in a
number of formats for use in a number of players, QuickTime
player, various Apple players, RealPlayer, Windows Media,
BlackBerry and Flash players.
We just released version 251 for windows. Many of you
are probably aware that the Mac version is currently broken.
We ran into problems when Apple switched to Intel Macs and
when Apple deprecated its support for an interface called QT
Java, which is their implementation of Java. MAGpie is a
Java application. When Apple deprecated QT Java we ran into
problems. We are still working with them to not necessarily
reinstate support as it says on the slide but figure out a
way around it.
For the time being you are best using Windows. If you
have a Mac and you can run Windows on your Mac through
parallel or VMware, which is how I run MAGpie, is on a Mac
with VMware, you can use MAGpie that way, but still in the
Windows environment.
MAGpie 251, had a couple of important changes. One,
we've already talked about which is support for captions
that can be used on BlackBerry devices. Another is that
we've cleaned up the installer, which was always a
problem -- well, not always, but for many people was a
problem. We've made the installation much easier to deal
with now. So there are fewer steps.
Okay. Next. Thanks.
On the screen now is a picture of MAGpie itself. It's
a rather simple interface. There are two windows. There is
the editor which is the large window in the back and the
player which is the smaller I positioned in the front. You
can position these on the screen however you like.
In the editor, you will see that there are four
columns, well five really, but four that you use, going from
left to right. There is a column with time codes that
indicate the start time of the caption meaning when the
caption should appear on the screen.
The next column to the right is called the end time
which is a time code that you use when you want to indicate
when a caption should erase. In the next column to the
right, that is the speaker column which is where you type
the identification of the speaker of the caption.
There is not always information in the speaker column.
You generally type information there when you need to
identify who is speaking if they are not on the screen, such
as an off screen narrator. And then on the right is the
good stuff, which is the caption themselves.
Each one of those cells represent one caption. In
general, you use a maximum of three rows of text per
caption, although depending on your purposes, you can put in
more. You can fill the caption region with pretty much as
much text as you like, but we usually say no more than
three.
And then in the little window in the front, in the
player window, you will see that there is a video region and
a caption region. The nice thing about MAGpie is that you
can enter caption text or import caption text. And after
you assign time codes to it, you can see the captions
playing in the player window. So you can check your work
from within the application.
Here is a very basic rundown of the captioning process.
The way that it works is first of all, you have to have a
transcript of the audio. So, you can create that in a
number of ways. You can type it yourself into a text editor
like Notepad or Word pad or Text Edit or BV Edit or XMLSpy
whatever you want to use.
If you format it, so that between each block of
captions you put an extra carriage return, you can then
import that transcript into MAGpie. And every extra
carriage return is interpreted as a new caption cell. So
you can effectively write the transcript outside of MAGpie
import it. And then each caption will be dumped into its
own little cell, which is how most people use MAGpie.
On the other hand, if you simply want to type into
MAGpie, you position the cursor in a caption cell and you
start typing. When you are ready for a new caption, you hit
the enter key twice. It opens a new cell and you just
continue typing.
You can control the player from the keyboard. If you
are transcribing directly into MAGpie, you simply press F6
to play and pause. And you press F7 to stop, which takes
you back to the beginning of the movie. So when you are
transcribing in MAGpie, you press F6 type into the caption
cell, if you want to pause. Press F6 and it will rewind a
couple of seconds when it resumes playing again, which is
handy for transcription.
After you do the transcription, you can tidy up the
text a little bit, change the line breaks. You can add
color if you want to add color. You can split the captions.
You can combine the captions. And then you can start adding
time codes.
And timing is actually quite simple in MAGpie. Let's
say you go back to the beginning of the movie. You press F6
to play. And you click in the first caption cell. And when
you hear the first word of the first caption, you press the
F9 key. Pressing F9 grabs the time code at that instant and
puts it into the time start box. And then it moves the
focus down one row to the next caption.
So when you hear the first word of the next caption,
you press F9 again and so on for the whole file.
When you want to have a pause in the captions on
screen, which is to say if nobody is speaking and there is
no audio, you press F10 at the last word of a caption and
MAGpie will automatically put in an out time and then move
to the next caption and get ready for the next press of F9.
That's it. It's pretty simple.
After you get done timing, you can go back and review
your work, play the movie within MAGpie and you will see the
captions appear on the screen. If you see a mistake, you
simply pause the movie, make a correction, if you misspell
the word, if you miss some text, if you need to add a
caption. You can change the timing by moving the slider and
the time line, stopping and then pressing the F9 key and it
will reassign a time code to the caption. And that is that.
Next slide.
And don't forget if you need to ask questions, just
type them into the window and I will see them on the screen.
Here we have pretty much a repetition of what I just
said. The summary of the captioning process. There you go,
stop right there. Thank you.
Playing the media back in MAGpie, transcribing, writing
the text into captions, timing the captions.
Is there a spell check built into MAGpie? Yes, there
is a spell check built into MAGpie. We tidied it up a
little bit recently, so it works better than it used to.
Yes, it is there. It is under the edit menu.
After you finish the timing process and you review the
captions, like I said, you then export the captions into the
text format that is compatible with your video player or
your video format. And this is where things can get a
little bit confusing. So relatively speaking, the
captioning process while it can be time consuming, is not
always as complicated as figuring out what format you want
to use.
Somebody is asking about importing video into MAGpie.
You are not actually importing video into MAGpie. You are
using MAGpie as a player video. MAGpie is happiest with any
format that is supported by QuickTime. Because it is using
a QuickTime plug in for play back. So that means any MOV,
M4V, AVI. You can even caption MP3 files. You cannot
caption WMVs unless you convert that first to so some other
formats like AVI.
But any format that will play in QuickTime will play in
MAGpie. If you only have an FLV, which is a Flash format,
that also will not play back in MAGpie but you can also
convert that using software from iSky for example to convert
10
that into an MOV.
Somebody is saying how long on average would you say it
would caption one hour of video. Well, next slide, I think
will answer that question. If you hit the next slide.
Thank you.
It takes to do about ten minutes of video -- you can
extrapolate from that. To do about ten minutes of video, if
you are an experienced captioner, it might take you about a
half an hour from the very beginning to the very end when
you finish exporting and everything. If you are a beginner,
you should give yourself at least an hour, an hour and a
half.
Now, this depends on how fast a typist you are, if you
already have a transcript, how much you care about accuracy
meaning if you want the captions to be accurate to a shot
change, it's going to take you longer to assign time codes.
But if you just want text on the screen and you don't have
to worry about shot changes, you can bang out a ten-minute
video pretty quickly. I would say to do an hour, give
yourself a day, if you are an experienced captioner.
If you are a beginner, you are going to need a couple
of days to do an hour, but as you get used to the process
and determine your level of accuracy, that time will
obviously get reduced.
Could I repeat the software?
Okay, yes. For conversion, I use something called
iSkysoft, video converter. If you go to iSkysoft,
iskysoft.com. They sell video converters for Mac and
Windows. It is inexpensive, I think it's about $40, maybe
45. And you can use it to convert not just to FLV, but from
a whole bunch of formats to a whole bunch of other formats.
It is very useful. It is very accurate. It is very
fast. And I would recommend using it for video conversions
if you are preparing files to caption them on MAGpie.
Another questions here. How about if you type 90 words
a minute? Good for you. Then it will take you that much
less time to create the transcript. Remember, MAGpie is not
used for live captioning. It is used for pre produced
programming. So your typing speed will come in handy as you
are preparing the transcript for captioning, but remember,
this is not live captioning as something is airing. This is
pre produced.
From time to time, I caption a video and later add
audio near the beginning. Is there an easy way to add start
and end times of multiple captions in said amount of time?
Yes. If I am understanding your question correctly, if
you're editing in audio after you've created a caption file,
you can simply add extra caption cells to the beginning or
the end or the middle, whatever you like. And then retime
those cells.
You may need to do a global offset if you change the
time line, meaning if your original first caption started at
zero, and then you came back a day later and added some
audio before that, you will need to -- therefore,
effectively moving zero back, you will need to do a global
offset of all of the text. And MAGpie gives you an offset
capability too.
Will there be a live captioning feature added? We
don't have plans to do that. That involves a whole other
set of architecture and approach. For live captioning you
won't be able to use MAGpie for the foreseeable future.
Can you use MAGpie to caption Jing videos, which are
simpler than Camtasia? I have used Camtasia -- well I have
used Camtasia for screen captures and video tutorials and
things like that. And I have played around with their
captioning implementation. And you are right, it is not
very easy to use. It wasn't intended to be, I think,
something to use for big projects like MAGpie.
Quite frankly I am not familiar with Jing. If it is
something similar to Camtasia, I am going to guess that it's
probably not the most intuitive simple way to write
captions.
Somebody is asking iSky -- once again, it is called
letter i S-K-Y-S-O-F-T.
Okay. Next slide.
So it would be a good idea to talk a little bit about
the caption formats that are exported by MAGpie, which will
help you understand what you need to export after you write
the captions.
After you finish writing the captions and timing them,
and editing them, and making sure that everything looks how
you want it to look, you can then under the export menu
choose from a number of options which will create text files
in the format compatible with your target player.
For example, if your target player is the QuickTime
player, you can choose the QTtext option. QT Text is a
propriety text format from Apple which plays in the
QuickTime player. You can create open or close captions but
if you want to use QTtext as a closed option, you need to
supply an on-screen control, which is to say you need to
create a little button to turn the captions on and off.
QTtext files, although it is -- are referenced
externally, it can be embedded as well, but they are
referenced externally using a markup format called SMIL,
S-M-I-L, Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language.
SMIL is used by the RealPlayer as well. And the way
that SMIL works basically is it's a text file that contains
markup language pointing to the video source and the caption
source, and the audio source, if you like, if that is
separate.
But in a simple implementation, you have a pointer to
the video file, a pointer to the text file. And when the
user clicks on a link that says play this QuickTime movie,
that link points to the SMIL file. And the player looks at
the SMIL file, grabs the video resource, grabs the text
resource and synchronizes them on the fly.
That is how it also works in the RealPlayer using a
text format called RealText. Again, that is a proprietary
format only used by the RealPlayer and you can create open
captions using RealText in the RealPlayer.
In Windows Media Player, you need to export the text in
a format called SAMI, which is as I said earlier, it is
playable only in Window Medias Players. It is not supported
by Microsoft anymore. Although it can still be used in
Windows Media Player. It is not undergoing any improvement
and hasn't for a long time.
It only works on Windows. There is no implementation
for it on the Mac. It will create only closed captions.
And it is used as an external caption file, meaning the
captions are not embedded in the movie. They are
synchronized on the fly, similar to SMIL.
Okay. Next question -- I mean, next slide. And
somebody is asking a question. I have choppy audio when I
try to play movies in MAGpie. Oh, yes, I have thoughts
about that. There is a reason for that. In the most recent
release of QuickTime, which I think is 764, Apple
accidentally broke the implementation of SMIL.
You will notice that if you play your source video back
in the QuickTime player, if you just open the video file and
play them in the QuickTime player, the audio will be fine,
but if you play that source video as part of a SMIL
presentation, which is to say using an export from MAGpie,
the audio sounds awful. It sounds staticy.
This is a bug they introduced in 764. And we reported
it to the developer site. And I know others have
complained. I haven't heard yet from Apple when this is
going to be fixed. Probably within the next release of
QuickTime 765.
If you go back to 762, this problem does not occur. So
if you can unload seven -- the current version of QuickTime
and go back to, I think, it is 762, you will be able to hear
fine.
Okay. Other formats exported by MAGpie. We have DFXP,
which is now known as TTML, or Time Text Markup Language.
Again, as I said earlier this, is a time text format from
the W3C that is finished. It is just needing final
approval, which ought to come later this year.
It is currently used to display closed captions in
Flash players and in Microsoft Silverlight players. It is
an external file format meaning the captions are not
embedded in the video, but effectively synchronized on the
fly.
If you are a Flash author, you can use a captioning
component from Adobe to synchronize the captions. Or you
can use NCAM's own CCforFlash, which I will talk about in
just a minute.
And then we have a new feature that we, that we put
into the latest release of MAGpie called TTXT, which is a
format used by BlackBerry smartphones to synchronize
captions. And these captions are in fact embedded in the
movie. They are closed meaning you can use the menu
interface on your BlackBerry phone to turn the captions on
and off. But they are not synchronized on the fly from an
external file. They are carried along with the video. So
that when you download the video, you are also downloading
the captions, but you won't see them until you turn them on.
And then finally, one format that MAGpie does not
export but which is important to mention is the SCC format.
And this is the caption display format that is used by
Apple devices. Desk top players like QuickTime or iTunes
and portable players used on iPhones and iPads and iPod
touches and iPod Nanos and Apple TV as well, all encoded in
the SCC format.
Apple's representation of SCC looks just like the old
line-21 captions that we saw in the analog world for so many
years. They are closed captions. They are not exported by
MAGpie for a number of reasons.
You can use MAGpie to create this source text file.
And then use some other tools to convert that into SCC. And
I mention that in another slide that is coming up. But
MAGpie itself will not export SCC files.
Okay. Next.
When you are trying to decide if you want to use
external or embedded captions, a lot of that is determined
by the player that you are using. But just for general
reference, it is important to understand the differences.
External caption files are synchronized at the time of
playback. You have already assigned time code to them. And
the player is displaying them as the presentation is
unrolling on the screen.
They have a number of advantages. If you have the
captions housed in an external text file, you can change
them with any text editor. It's very easy. And then when
you play the movie again, that change will be evident. It
doesn't add anything to the size of the video. They can be
turned on and off, obviously. And because the captions are
housed in a text file, they can be easily searched.
Next slide, please.
And then when you are talking about embedded captions,
there are some advantages to that as well. The captions are
always delivered with the video. So you don't have to worry
about synchronization problems. They can be turned on and
off depending on the player. There is no worry about
maintaining additional files and making sure they are always
available from a server. However, they may increase the
size of the video depending on how much time you are talking
about.
Captions added to a ten-minute video don't add too much
weight, but captions added to a two-hour video, they add a
decent amount of bandwidth.
You can't easily edit the captions because you have to
edit them externally and then re-embed them which adds
another step in the process. And depending on the player
you are using, they may not be searchable. So people may
not be able to use them as an index when they are looking
for specific information in a video presentation.
Okay. Next slide.
And you can't talk about captions these days without
talking about Flash. So we will spend a couple of minutes
talking about captions in Flash. As I said earlier, there
is no such thing as a default Flash player, everybody rolls
their own. And so the interface for displaying captions is
probably going to look different from one player to the
next.
So each player is unique, but you can use MAGpie to
create the actual captioned file that can be used in your
Flash implementation.
For example, if you are an experienced Flash author,
you can use a free application that we have called
CCforFlash. It is a free component, actually, that is good
for AS2 or AS3. It is a component that is used to
synchronize the captions with the video. So you can use
MAGpie to write the captions, to export the captions in DFXP
or TTML. And then you can use CCforFlash to include them
with the video.
And there are full instructions on the NCAM website if
you going to NCAM there is an item called tools on the home
page. If you click on tools you get a whole list of things
that we offer and CCforFlash is near the top of the list.
You can do a lot of customization with CCforFlash. You can
customize the area in which the captions appear, the height
and the width, the color, the opacity, all kinds of things
are available for experienced Flash authors there.
Next slide, please.
However, if you are not an experienced Flash author,
which I suspect is the majority of people, you can use a
player that we created specifically for non Flash authors
called ccPlayer. And ccPlayer is also free. It is a
prebuilt player that can be used to embed a Flash video in a
web page with captions.
As with CCforFlash, you can use MAGpie to create the
captions and export a DFXP file. And then using a Text
Editor or an HTML editor, you can simply plop some code that
we give you into your HTML for the web page, change a few
parameters to point to the caption file.
You can choose to make the movie play when the page
loads or not. You can change a few other parameters. You
point to the video file, and they are all done. CcPlayer as
I said earlier is fully accessible to keyboard and screen
reader users. You can also use it to create captions for
audio only.
And if you go to the next slide, you will see a picture
of what CC player looks like.
So here on the screen we have got a picture of a movie
playing in ccPlayer is a video region. And then at the
bottom you see a controller with play, pause, and the CC
button I mentioned earlier.
Actually, I seem to have included a picture where the
captions are not visible. How stupid of me. Well in that
black box that you see below the video, that is where the
captions go. I don't know how that got into this
presentation.
That's where the captions would be if you pressed the
CC button, then the captions will disappear, that turns them
off. If you press the CC button again, they will reappear.
You can also search the captions in ccPlayer. You can see
over to the right, you can see the screen there is a button
with a magnifying glass. If you click on that a little
search window will appear. Again, you can reach that from
the keyboard or the screen reader, type in some text, and
press the enter key. And ccPlayer will bounce you to the
point in a time line where that text string appears.
There is also a full screen mode. And there is also a
help system as well. Again, all of this is accessible in
the keyboard.
Somebody is asking, will this player ever be able to
use audio descriptions?
Right now, ccPlayer will not synchronize descriptions
on the fly. If you want an audio described movie in an FLV
format, they need to be open.
Somebody is asking if this process is compatible with
Macs, Snow Leopard or PC only.
If you are talking about MAGpie, MAGpie right now is
broken on the Mac, if you are using an Intel Mac, which most
people are. But on Windows, it is fine. We just released a
new version, 251 for Windows. We are still working with
Apple on a way around the Mac problem.
Okay. Next slide, please.
Do we have any recommendations for automatically
generating a transcript from video. That's hard to say. We
don't have software right now for that. You can, quite
frankly, you can use YouTube to generate a transcript. You
can use their auto cap feature, which I am not sure right
now if it will save the transcript for you, or if that is
something that is coming soon. You can do that.
And then you could download the transcript and clean it
up because it will need cleaning up, as you probably know
their auto cap feature is still being improved.
There are some other speech to text software packages
available with varying degrees of accuracy, but right now,
if you want truly accurate captions, you need human
intervention. So you need to either do the clean up with
the human or the human needs to actually type the captions
from the beginning.
For instructions on adding captions to video, since we
only have five minutes left, I will summarize this. If you
go to the NCAM website, which is NCAM.wgbh.org. Click on
the link for tools which is on the home page, that will take
you to a list of all of the tools for captioning and other
purposes that we provide at NCAM for free. You can download
MAGpie. You can download CCforFlash. You can download
ccPlayer.
We have a set of guidelines called accessible digital
media which have a lot of information about creating
accessible multimedia. They are available from the tools
page as well.
And next slide please. sorry. One more slide.
Somebody is asking is there a way to have closed audio
descriptions with any FLV player, including YouTube.
YouTube right now, no. I can't tell you if the people
at Google are working on a way to implement closed
descriptions which is to say have a button on the screen
that will toggle on and off, an audio track with
descriptions. If you can hit the next slide when you get a
second.
That sounds like something that Google is going to want
to do, but I can't say that they will or they won't.
I believe the JW player will allow you to toggle closed
audio descriptions. If you look up the JW player which is
another Flash player but also supports closed captions, they
did for a while have support for additional audio tracks.
Quite frankly, I don't know if they still do, but that would
be the only other place to check.
The other way to transmit descriptions is of course to
have them open and give the user a choice between a movie
that is described and a movie that is not described.
And then finally just a few policies and guidelines. I
always like to mention when we are talking about accessible
multimedia, Section 508 regulations, which are currently
being refreshed, which is to say revised, which is to say
they won't be ready probably for a number of months, perhaps
in the middle of next year, but they talk a lot about
synchronized multimedia, synchronized captions and
descriptions for multimedia.
Accessible multimedia guidelines which I just
mentioned. And of course the Web Content Accessibility
Guidelines Version 2, which talk a lot about synchronized
alternatives like captions and audio descriptions.
And at two minutes to 3:00, I believe that is all I
have time for. Norm?
: Okay, Geoff. Excellent presentation. And I will
have the slides available on the resources page as well as a
link to these web pages and a link to the recording. And as
I said earlier, if I get as many as five people asking for a
transcription, I will spend the money and get this
transcribed.
And I want to thank Geoff for an excellent
presentation. And thank WGBH for all of the work they've
done on MAGpie for, gee, must be 15 years at least. So
thank you very much, Geoff.
And Geoff mentioned the refresh of the 508 standards.
And we have a two-hour webinar with captions on the refresh
of the web -- 508 standards Monday at 2:00 o'clock. And if
you go to our web page, EASI.CC slash webinar -- not slash
webinar, EASI.CC and select webinar, you can register for
the 508 thing on Monday. And Monday is coming quickly. So
you better get in there. We have 200 people registered for
that as of yesterday also.
So I thank everybody for coming. And I thank Geoff and
Marisol again. And I guess we can stop the recording,
Marisol.