On Wed, 16 Feb 2011 12:30:06 +0100, Silvia Pfeiffer
<[email protected]> wrote:
On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 9:27 PM, timeless <[email protected]> wrote:
On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 10:23 AM, Kevin Marks <[email protected]>
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.
I've had the same idea. The rendering of captions is already defined as
being on top of another element, namely the parent <video> element.
Technically, I don't think it would be very difficult to allow the
captions to be rendered into some other container. I think this kind of
feature should wait until we have implementations of the current spec,
though.
--
Philip Jägenstedt
Core Developer
Opera Software
