[Athen] Two things

[John Foliot - Stanford Online Accessibility Program]

Charlie Jordan wrote:
 

> Also -- not to beat a dead horse, but if you've been captioning,

> would you mind giving advice about what file formats we should be

> offering videos in?  Many of my institution's promo videos are in

> quicktime and wmv; are there better choices both for captioning and

> "playability" features?  


Repost from earlier today to another list:

FLASH CAPTIONED VIDEO:

You want to investigate the JW FLV Player.
[http://www.jeroenwijering.com/?item=JW_FLV_Player]  Most of the heavy
lifting has already been done for you.

You will need a copy of Flash CS3 to create your FLV files (or any other
flash tool that can export FLV files), and of course you will need a
time-stamped Transcript file.  JW FLV currently supports files in either the
.SRT format or (allegedly the DFXP) .XML format
[http://www.jeroenwijering.com/?item=Making_Video_Accessible], although I
have not been able to get that to work (??).  However using .SRT, it is/was
slick. 

(You can generate an SRT file using a number of shareware/free tools - I
like and have used Subtitle Workshop
[http://www.urusoft.net/products.php?lang=1])

Once you have the FLV and SRT files, upload them (along with the JW_FLV
Player SWF) to your server, embed some code into your web-page, and presto:
YouTube style streaming + captioned video.
[http://soap.stanford.edu/jw_flv_player/index.html]  Note that the
captioning can be toggled on or off (The "T" in the toolbar), and that your
videos can be "branded" using a separate, semi-transparent PNG file (cool
factor).  As an additional benefit, the JW FLV Player can also support an
additional descriptive audio file (as MP3) - making it one of the most
accessible playback mechanisms I've run across.

One item to note:  due to security settings in Flash, the SWF, FLV and SRT
files all need to originate from the same server, although I have
successfully placed the files in individual sub-directories of the root IP
address.

Hope that helps

JF
===================================
John Foliot 
Academic Technology Consultant 
Stanford Online Accessibility Program
http://soap.stanford.edu
Stanford University
Tel: 650-862-4603
===================================