>Does anyone have a good solution for integrating video streamed over >Flashcom and captions (in multiple languages) ?
>I've done some research but didn't find enough information. >Many thanks I have some experience in this, but am not sure it's a good solution. We used a product called HiCaption. Basically you watch your movie (in something non-flv, it doesn't handle flv) in HiCaption and type in your captions. You stop the movie every 3 seconds, or however long you want the length of each caption to be, and can either actually type the caption in for that little snippet, or can copy and paste it in if you have a transcript ahead of time. HiCaption the outputs an XML file that basically contains the captions and the timing of when each one should appear. You then use the HiCaption component in your .swf, hook it up to point to the XML file, and the captions run. We found that it didn't work as bulletproof as we hoped. It seemed for longer videos (like over 5 minutes), the HiCaption component slowed down near the end, so the captions would be off. Of course there was also the problem that your video was streaming from FlashCom, but the caption component was using the timings fixed in the XML.... so if your video took a few seconds to start, your captions could possibly be ahead. We did a check every few seconds for the progress of the video and synched the captions in the HiCaption component to match.... in a few cases, however, depending on where that gets the caption file to 'land', you sometimes get a skipped caption or two, or the captions would be slightly ahead or behind, sometimes both within various points of the movie. HiCaption also just runs... meaning, if you wanted your user to be able to jump forward or ahead in the video, the video of course would respond, but the captions would keep playing from the original spot. Hence, our little check every few seconds. It wasn't all that bad, but it wasn't all that great either. If I had to do it over again, I would have just used HiCaption to get the timings... and then literally copy and pasted each caption into a keyframe on the timeline. Then, done one check a few seconds into the video as to progress of the video to make sure it's synched with the captions on the timeline, and then just let it run from there. Or just kick off the timeline on the video start event, depends what video component you may be using if the video start event is available, I've seen a few that don't even offer that! This of course would still require you to move your playhead to the approriate spot for captions whenever someone scrubbed the video. This methodology sounds so crazy and manual-labor, but after fussing with the darn thing for so long trying to get the HiCaption to behave that sounded pretty good. After watching the HiCaption component run by itself, with nothing else on the stage going on, and seeing that thing slooooow dowwwwwn near the end I was ready to tear my hair out. Maybe we just didn't implement the thing correctly and there was some magic thing we just never figured out, who knows, right? Sooo.... not sure if I'm recommending this or not. HiCaption I think could handle any language.... don't remember. It is supposed to be accessible to screenreaders as well, although we didn't check wiht one to see how it actually behaved. Good luck. Anastasia _______________________________________________ [email protected] To change your subscription options or search the archive: http://chattyfig.figleaf.com/mailman/listinfo/flashcoders Brought to you by Fig Leaf Software Premier Authorized Adobe Consulting and Training http://www.figleaf.com http://training.figleaf.com
