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Switching Subtitles On The Fly

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Thomas Lewin
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I'm trying to see if the following can be solved with Brightsigns:

A museum I'm working with has looping interview content on five screens. One Brightsign would act as the primary, making sure that the content on the other four stays in sync (the videos are all the same length). 

The content is in multiple languages, so the museum would like subtitles available in two languages, local and English. Would I be able to set up some kind of switch to happen on the fly, triggered by a GPIO event? Either switch .srt files on the fly, or perhaps have the subtitles burned in, and just swap visible layers? 

Or is there another, easier way to get the subtitles to change on the fly?

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    Bright Scripters

    Have you found the solution you needed?

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    Thomas Lewin

    Got a response from support that's helpful for this particular situation:

    If this is a single video, since your model should be dual decode capable, you can show/hide zones with the GPIO trigger. So, by default it would show in one language and then you can hide that active zone and show the other zone with the desired subtitles.
     
    https://brightsign.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/DOC/pages/370671753/Interactive+Presentations
    https://brightsign.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/DOC/pages/370671825/Commands
     
    The first step would be to create 2 video zones and you can go from there.
     
    Enabling/showing the subtitles on the fly and disabling/hiding is a little bit more tricky. Are you using HTML5 for the subtitles? I suspect you're using the plugin we have for this. https://github.com/brightsign/BrightAuthor-Plugins/tree/master/Subtitles-Widget
    I'm unsure how dynamic this change can be. I think you would need to be mindful of the Language first, and choose whether or not you want to show subtitles and only then start playback. So, this would mean that the video would likely need to start from the beginning when you want to show/enable subtitles in a different language.
     

    So as long as you've got a dual decode model, it's possible to play two videos with burned in subtitles, play them simultaneously, and swap the visibility with GPIO events.

    Getting subtitles to swap on the fly using HTML doesn't sound possible right now, unless I'm mistaken. Hopefully that's something that can be addressed, as I know museums are already wanting to get more than two languages on videos for accessibility reasons.

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    Patrick Cournoyer

    How to create 2 video zones on HD225 ?  It supposed to have dual HD decoder.

     

    Thanks

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    Ken Campbell

    Thomas,

    I'd look at switching SubRip files on the fly. Looks like a plugin already exists:

    SUBTITLES SRT FILE – BrightSign Support

    Burned in tends to look better though, more formatting options via your NLE, etc. I find it's always a compromise choosing between the two on a project.

    Cheers,

    Ken

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