Archive for the 'movies' Category
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Jaman is an online movie site that specializes in indie, art house, and foreign films. Full-length feature movies can be downloaded to watch on your computer or television (no iPod or iPhone capability, yet) and cost $1.99 to rent and $4.99 to purchase. There are over 1,000 titles to choose from, and being that a lot of these selections are foreign, there are films available that come with English subtitles.
I am hoping that Jaman will show other movie download companies that subtitles/captions on downloads do work. Dear iTunes and Netflix: hint, hint.
Previously:
Emirates Airlines becomes first airline to offer closed captioning on inflight entertainment
dotSUB allows users to create their own captions
Blinkx
QuickTime – now with closed captioning
iTunes and closed captioning
Closed captioning on movie trailers
AOL is testing captioning on online videos
Project ReadOn – free web captions
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In November, Emirates Airlines became the first major airline to offer closed captions on inflight entertainment. All seats in all classes of the airline are equipped with their iCE (Information Communication Entertainment) system, which offers over 600 channels and other snazzy features, such as viewing the aircraft’s external cameras, and sending SMS or email from your seat. Passengers now have the option to turn on closed captions when viewing movies or television programs, and the captions are offered in up to 12 languages. Panasonic Avionics‘ eX2 technology is what is driving the closed captions.
I hope we’ll be seeing this in more airlines soon.
Previously:
dotSUB allows users to create their own captions
Blinkx
QuickTime – now with closed captioning
iTunes and closed captioning
Closed captioning on movie trailers
AOL is testing captioning on online videos
Project ReadOn – free web captions
Closed Captioning for Flash
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In May of this year (yes, I’m a little behind, sorry) Apple updated their QuickTime media to include support for closed captioning. This is very good – the road to bringing captions to the online world has been filled with potholes, and Apple’s recent update has helped make the road a little bit smoother. There is still a long way to go, however. TV episodes and movies downloaded through iTunes still lack captions, although they have no reason to now.
The update includes separate versions for OSX and Windows.
Previously:
iTunes and closed captioning
Closed captioning on movie trailers
Casting Words transcripting services
Speche Communications: real time text streaming
Jott’s potential to transcribe podcasts is unrealized
Earize Text Streaming for Internet Radio
Podcast transcripts for the deaf
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Via the CaptionKeeper website:
CaptionKeeper is a software program which converts television-based closed-caption data into web streaming formats. It takes closed-caption (line-21) data as input, and creates simultaneous outputs suitable for live and archived multimedia presentations in RealPlayer™, Windows Media™ Player and QuickTime™ Player formats.
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DivX movies and video torrents downloaded from the Internet can be played with an accompanying subtitle file called XSUB that is embedded in a .divx container. Here’s a selection of some subtitle resources:
- DivX Subtitles: subtitle files for DivX, DVD, and HDTV. Offered in other languages besides English. Subtitles are created by forum users and have a rating system.
- Subtitles Box: DivX and DVD subtitles.
- Open Subtitles: user-generated subtitle files in various languages.
- DivX Station
- RDW Subtitles
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Project ReadOn is a standalone caption player that provides captions for online media such as videos and podcasts. They are funded by sponsors, ads, and grants. The captioners watch online videos and transcribe the spoken text into captions which are viewed online using an interesting web browser technology – there are no fees, and there is no software to download or install; users simply visit the Project ReadOn website and browse through the available selection of captioned videos, and a narrow, rectangular-sized window pops up automatically and positions itself over the video being viewed. As the user watches the video, they read the captions and watch the video simultaneously. I’ve captured a screen shot here:
Only one month old (the company just came to life in March 2007,) they’ve already captioned their 100th video and encourage people to contact them with suggestions and requests; they have a handy “submit request” field in the top right corner of each page on their website.
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It used to be a real pain in the neck to find rear-window and open captioned movies. Here’s the old way of searching:
1] Go to Mopix and find out what current films are rear-window captioned. Pick one that looks interesting.
2] Find out when and where it was playing. This page shows a listing of all RWC-equipped theaters in the US. There is no single website that shows rear window captioned movie showtimes and locations, sadly, so you’ll have to do that research yourself.
3] Visit the main website for the theaters listed in your region that have RWC technology installed. These could be, for example, Loew’s, AMC, and Mann’s.
4] After visiting each site and entering the name of the movie and your zip code, you may or may not find out if the movie you’re interested in seeing is rear window captioned in your area. If it is, congratulations. If not, proceed to Step 5.
5] Check to see if it’s open-captioned on InSight’s poorly-designed website.
6] It is? Good, you’re done. It’s not? Go back to Step 1 and start all over again.
Total time spent gathering this information: 30 minutes.
Here’s the new way:
Go to Fomdi, enter your zipcode and a date, and click “Find.” Total time: 30 seconds.
Fomdi can search over 50 websites in under 10 seconds and finds an average of 3.09 movies per search. Movies playing up to 7 days in advance turn up in the search. The radius around the zip code can be increased in various mileage increments, up to 40 miles. The website even works on the browser of my Sidekick, which means I can look up movie times when I’m out and about.
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In the past year and half, the popularity of YouTube has increased across the Internet. YouTube is a video sharing website where users can upload, share, view, watch, and rank videos on the Internet. The videos are displayed into Adobe Flash (.flv) format.
Many videos on YouTube do not have captions or subtitles, although there are a few that can be found. Most of them are foreign language videos with English subtitles.
On March 8, 2007, the Access Division of WGBH announced that they had created a component for Flash called CC for Flash that can be used to display captions in a Flash video player. This new technology will allow developers more ease in adding captions to Flash videos. In addition, millions of deaf and hard of hearing users will be able to experience Web-based video in Flash, and search engines will be able to utilize captions as search metadata for SWF content.
CC for Flash can be written into any SWF file and played back in Adobe Flash Player, which works on most recent Mac and PC systems. Both CC for Flash and Adobe Flash Player are free.
Taken from the press release:
CC for Flash: The Details
- Uses external files produced in the W3C’s Distribution Format Exchange Profile (DFXP) of the Timed-Text Authoring Format.
- Imports existing formats such as Apple QuickTime’s QTtext, with support for Microsoft’s SAMI format soon to follow.
- Exposes many of its internal functions through ActionScript™ language so that the author can control and customize many of the features.
- Can play back caption metadata that has been embedded in the video by tools such as Captionate.
- Can be linked to any video playback components in Flash or directly to Netstream objects in the SWF of the FLV file.
- Allows the author to set the caption display box coordinates and default text attributes, like background color, text foreground color, font face and size, opacity, etc., at authoring time. At playback time, any text attributes that are explicitly defined in the external caption file will override the defaults.
- Captions can be added after the video content in Flash is posted, allowing for flexibility across production and distribution environments.
- Allows captions to be searched.
- Comes with an optional player, ccPlayer for Flash, which allows those unfamiliar with Flash programming to embed video content in Flash into a Web page with minimal effort.
- Is compatible with Flash MX2004 (7) and 8 authoring packages.
I’m looking forward to seeing more captioned videos on YouTube.
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Currently available in the US and Canada[1], the rear window captioning system was developed by WGBH and Rufus Butler Seder in 1997. Rear window captioning, or RWC, is an ingenious technology that provides closed captioning to deaf or hard-of-hearing movie theater patrons in a way that is more economical than open captioning or subtitling, has zero impact on the film print and is less intrusive to the experience of the general theater audience.
In the past, deaf movie fans have had the following options:
- Wait for the film to come out on DVD/VHS with closed captions and watch it at home.
- See a special open-captioned screening. In open captioning, one reel has captions laser-cut onto the print and then it is traveled around the country, where it is shown in limited locations for only a few days.
- Attend a special screening with American Sign Language interpreters standing up front.
How RWC works: At the movie theater, you pick up a transparent acrylic panel at the front desk. You take it to your seat (and you can sit anywhere,) and insert the end in the cup holder of your seat. At the back of the theater, under the projection window, is a LED text mount installed on the wall. The captions are displayed backwards on the LED mount. The acrylic panel which you have at your seat is attached to a flexible metal “arm” that you adjust until the panel reflects the LED text, which you read while simultaneously watching the film. The captions are distributed on a CD-ROM that is installed in a computer that plays the captions in sync with the movie.
[1] As far as I know, RWC is currently only available in the US and Canada. In Canada, it is available in all the provinces except for Quebec due to bilingual (French/English) issues. I think RWC might be available in the UK, but I could not find any evidence. If RWC is available elsewhere, please let me know.
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I recently asked Apple why the movies offered at the iTunes Store do not have closed captioning, and was told that QuickTime does not deal with CEA-608 Closed Caption data.
However, the sneak peek on Leopard accessibility says:
QuickTime currently supports closed captioning by including a text track alongside audio and video content. But improved QuickTime support will automatically display the CEA-608 closed captioning text standard in analog broadcasts in the U.S.
Hopefully when Leopard is released with its improved captioning features, Apple will start offering closed captioning on movies and television shows being sold at the iTunes Store.
