New post
0

SRT Captions MIA

Avatar
Jeremy Littler
None
Follow

Hi There: 

I was wondering if anyone could provide a step by step process for displaying captions with video player widget (an example presentation?).  We are at a point where captioning is being mandated by legislation and any adoption of Brightsign at my University will be completely out of the question if the platform does not support this as a standard feature. 

We are now regularly receiving files with srt files and yet there does not appear to be a way to display these in BrightSign using just the video player object. It occurs to me that this should absolutely be an on/off option in the video player properties. Is there a roadmap to add this?

As a stop gap I do see some option for using a raw text file, though that is not SRT and frankly it would be insanely time consuming to have to parse a SRT to the text format BS requires. I've had no luck getting that to work.

 

So, if there is an example presentation demonstrating captioning (ideally SRT)  I would greatly appreciate it. 

Help! 

 

Date Votes

4 comments

  • 0
    Avatar
    Lyndon

    We support captions and have since the very first product released in 2006.  It depends on how you're doing captions.

    If caption information is embedded in the video, you can display it easily using html playback. The video player can support this playback but you need a plugin, already written, to turn on the caption feature for the video player object. Support ca provide you with a link to that plugin. 

    If you have separate caption files, please send a sample file to support. I know we've done plugins that support srt playback. They don't all work exactly the same way. Do you just want to be able to save your caption files using the same name as your video, and then during playback, the unit will automatically play the corresponding caption file when the video plays?

    Or, are you looking for more control over caption playback, not automatic playback. 

    You say that converting srt to text is time consuming. But I've never had a customer send me an srt file that wasn't a text file.  Can you post a sample srt file, a version you don't want to convert, and I'll take a look at it. Or, if you already have a case open with support, please send me the case number.

    While we've had intermittent requests for captions, I only see a handful of them per year. It could be that most customers are now doing it with html and using video with embedded captions, so no separate files. Most of the recent caption projects I've seen used embedded captions and no separate files. 

     

    I don't know of any roadmap for adding srt support natively. But of the long list of features customers have asked for, and that we have on our feature list with development, caption support doesn't crack the top 25. It hasn't been something that comes up regularly at shows or via customer contacts. But, I've yet to have a customer where captions couldn't be made to work. 

  • 0
    Avatar
    Lyndon

    if you could export your presentation with all assets and the plugin, we could easily test why yours isn't working.

     

  • 0
    Avatar
    Jeremy Littler

    Hi There: 

    Could you email me with the link to plugin for the caption playback plugin for the video player. I'd like to test it to see if it meets our captioning requirements. 

    Thanks in advance

     

  • 0
    Avatar
    Brandon

    The Subtitles Widget BrightAuthor plugin is on our Github page

    https://github.com/brightsign/BrightAuthor-Plugins/tree/master/Subtitles-Widget

Please sign in to leave a comment.