Archive for the Category: Captionate

Accessibility: Is a CC button deaf-friendly?

May 22, 2009 burakk

You learn something each day, sometimes it has a big impact.

Suppose you are designing a FLV video player. Unless the player is to be extremely simple, you will want to support displaying closed-captions/subtitles, either because you are truly accessibility conscious and care about it, or, because you find the idea of displaying subtitles for a foreign language movie cool. Surely, you will want to cover all bases.

Lets start adding captions support to the design:

  1. You will need to have a button, labeled 'CC', that toggles display of captions.
  2. Not all FLVs will have associated captions, so a feature can be to hide the CC button (rather than displaying it in disabled state) when there are no captions available. This will also provide more space for other controls, a slider may benefit from the extra space. [1]
  3. Some people will want to start with captions-on, so you will provide the programmatic interface to start with the CC button already clicked once.

Can you think of any other option? (Other than supporting multiple language tracks) Anything missing?

Until some minutes ago, I wouldn't know the missing option, and the CC button would be the symbol of my accessibility support.

Missing option is having captions on all the time without the CC button to turn them off.

What good is that for? Obviously you could have thought about this, but why would you want it?

Because, at a site for the deaf (which is what accessibility is really all about in this case), a CC button is not considered deaf-friendly. Captions must be present and displayed at all times [2].

Just like the way you (and I) think, 'let's not display the CC button because there won't be captions for some FLVs', you should also think, 'let's not display the CC button because there are times there will be captions all the time and they will never be turned off'.

A FLV player with a CC button, sure, is accessible. But if you really care about accessibility, you should have the option for not displaying that button.

That's what I learned today, from one of our Captionate [3] customers, who is creating web sites targeting deaf consumers, and who himself is also deaf. He is passionate about this. For him, it's not an option to have the CC button displayed, it's inappropriate, it's not deaf-friendly, end of story.

Could I ever, by myself, have thought about supporting captions without a CC button? Maybe… Could I ever have shared the passion about this? I don't think so.

Nothing is as simple as it looks, accessibility included.

[1] Obviously, if you have designed a player that works with different skins, you will want to have skins without a CC button (no captions support) and skins with a CC button that support captions. For the sake of this discussion, this is irrelevant.

[2] 'They can embed captions onto video in that case' will be too shallow thinking,

[3] We do not provide a player for deploying captioned FLVs with Captionate. We do not have a FLV player product.

Also posted in Flash, MG Tagged , , Comments Off

Flash Player 9 Update 3 Beta 2 (MovieStar): H.264, HE-ACC support

August 21, 2007 burakk

This is huge news for web video and for Flash in general. As a result this has been already covered a lot, but if you are blogging about Flash or web, you cannot skip this kind of news.

Here are some links:

Here are my notes:

  • Build number for this version (Beta 2) is 9.0.60.184. Update 3 Beta 1 was released in June (build 9.0.60.120). Release is expected ‘later this Fall’ (for the northern hemisphere).
  • Available at Adobe Labs. Windows installer size increase is around 200 KB, haven’t checked the player size yet. Because only browser players are available these new features/codecs won’t work inside Flash (which uses an internal player). Update: The toll is around 100 KB.
  • H.264 video (ISO/IEC 14496-12, ISO/IEC 14496-10, ISO/IEC 14496-3) and HE-ACC v2 audio support (also hardware accelerated fullscreen video for Linux) is new. Multi-core and hardware accelerated fullscreen video support also applies to the new H.264. I was somewhat expecting a move like this from Adobe, as Silverlight had a strong point about video, but I was, too, surprised as many to see this so soon.
  • This is huge because these are industry standard codecs also used by HD-DVD and Blu-Ray.
  • We’ll be able to play .mp4, .m4v, .m4a, .mov and .3gp files with the new Player (Xvid, DivX not supported). There will be no need to install Quicktime (and I don’t) for viewing Quicktime video.
  • I’m not sure about the future of FLV format as a container format. But it will be around and current codecs will, of course, be supported at least for backwards compatibility. You can even have H.264 in a FLV but this is ‘not encouraged’. I’m a bit sorry about this.
  • The new codecs also mean AIR desktop applications will be able to deliver standard HD quality content.

Speaking of AIR, also on the Adobe Labs you can now find beta 1 of Adobe AIR update for Flash CS3 which lets you target AIR from within Flash CS3.

Also posted in Central-Apollo-AIR, Flash, Flex Comments Off

Flash Video Player 3.8 Adds Captionate Support

May 10, 2007 burakk

Jeroen Wijering’s FLV Player is a well known and regarded, Creative Commons licensed, FLV player. Not everyone who makes use of FLV files needs to have Flash authoring tool. Jeroen Wijering’s FLV Player is easily configurable, has many options and plug-ins.

Today version 3.8 was released which added support for Captionate embedded captions. It supports multiple language tracks too, one at a time.

Let me show you how easy it is to use Captionate captions with it: Configuration is done by adding variables (flashvars) in HTML. There’s even an online wizard to help you, but modifying the sample HTML will be straightforward enough for most. Anyway, assuming your SWFObject is named ‘swf’, all you need to do is add the following line to the script in your web page:

swf.addVariable("captions","captionate");

This will display the first, default, language track. To display another tack just add the track number, like:

swf.addVariable("captions","captionate2");

which will display the 3rd language track. (Omitting the number means track 0, which is the value "captionate0").

You can see accessibility examples of the player online. BTW, I love full screen Flash video …

Also posted in Flash Tagged , , , 4 Comments

Adobe FLVCheck

May 10, 2007 burakk

Adobe FLVCheck tool is available at Adobe labs (Windows only)…

"The Adobe FLVCheck tool allows you to modify FLV files that are
created by non-Adobe technology so that they conform to the Adobe FLV
file specification. Malformed messages inside the FLV file have been
found to disrupt the quality of service when watching Flash Video over
the Macromedia Flash Media Server. To ensure your FLV files are
properly formed, use this FLVCheck tool to check the FLV files before
you let others see them."

Seems targeted to fix FLVs for FMS use, nevertheless may come in handy other times too.

Also posted in Flash 2 Comments

Captionate at Adobe Flash Developer Center

May 8, 2007 burakk

Michael A. Jordan‘s article titled ‘Captioning Flash video with Captionate and the captioning-supported FLVPlayback component skins‘ was published at Adobe Flash Developer Center on May 7th. (Technically it’s still May 7th in the US, but in my time zone it’s 8th).

The demo on the first page is something we should have done for Captionate long time ago, but never found the time.

"[The] tutorial teaches you how to add captions to your Flash video files using Captionate or cue points, and how to display those captions in a Flash movie using the FLVPlayback component and the FLVPlayback component skins with captioning support".

If you want to learn about Captionate, or FLV captioning, go to that article. (Note that the skins and the article is for AS2/Flash 8. Flash CS3 support in Captionate will arrive in June).

Also posted in Flash Tagged , , , Comments Off

FLV Metadata Viewer Beta

August 26, 2006 burakk

We have just released beta of FLVMDV: Free, Windows XP property sheet extension that displays FLV info (like dimensions, codecs, duration) and also the contents of the embedded onMetaData event for FLV (Flash video) files.

Flvmdv

We also released FLVMDI 2.9 two days ago, which can now extract onMetaData event data as an XML file, but having the info in file properties dialog is sometimes more convenient.

Please let us know of any issues, suggestions.

Also posted in Flash, MG 5 Comments

Captionate 2.0 Released!

October 15, 2005 burakk

Captionate, FLV (Flash Video) captioning solution, version 2.0 has been just released. New version supports Flash 8 Video Encoder cue points as a new data type. Also new values in…

Click to continue reading “Captionate 2.0 Released!”

Also posted in Flash, MG 2 Comments

FLV Players

July 18, 2005 burakk

FLV (Flash Video) format has great potential, but IMHO lack of a free stand alone player by Macromedia is not doing any good for popularity of the format. Nevertheless, there are free stand alone FLV players.

Martijn de Visser’s FLV Player is probably the best known (version 1.02 was released on May 3, 2004). Guy Watson, aka FlashGuru, also recently released a free Flash Video Player. We will definitely see FLV format around more and more – announced VP6 codec support is coming soon with 8ball, so it’s a good idea to grab a free player now…

On a related note, Michael Jordan recently featured a Captionate enabled online player on his site. The player is an enhanced version of the Macromedia’s Flash Video Kit player which supports displaying captions embedded by Captionate…

Also posted in Flash 6 Comments

FLV MetaData Injector 2.0 – Released!

June 22, 2005 burakk

After two months in beta, and only one bug found and fixed, we have released 2.0 version of our FLV MetaData Injector tool (free, Windows only).

This version adds lastkeyframetimestamp value, which is useful because most of the time you cannot seek after that point. Duration is more conservatively calculated and will be equal to lasttimestamp value more. onLastSecond event is injected at 1 second before the FLV end, which helps to get a notification that the FLV is about to end. Also a bug with framerate calculation has been fixed.

This version is actually a complete rewrite, using our new FLV library which is also used in Captionate. That’s why we had the public beta for two months (Our betas normally last at most a month).

FAQ section of the site was also updated. If you have tips to share about using onMetaData events or FLVMDI in general, please let us know.

Related earlier posts:

FLV MetaData Injector 2.0 – Public Beta

FLV MetaData Injector – released!

FLV MetaData Injector – Public Beta

Also posted in MG Comments Off

Captionate 1.0 released!

May 7, 2005 burakk

We have released Captionate, a Windows FLV captioning solution, a few hours ago.

Captionate 1.0

Captionate embeds multi language captioning data into Flash video files and you receive callbacks for the data via events like onCaption. It provides an easy to use interface to enter caption and marker (cue point) data with a preview and fully supports Unicode on Windows XP/2K.

Web site is currently under construction, but the help file is available for download if you are interested in learning more.

Update: October 15, 2005, Captionate 2.0 released.

Also posted in Flash, MG 9 Comments