Re: [gst-devel] Re: Totem or no Totem was Re: GNOME Development Series Snapshot 2.3.0: "Mighty Atom"

[Bill Haneman <bill haneman sun com>]

On Wed, 2003-04-23 at 01:32, Benjamin Otte wrote:

> People come and want SMIL for anything. SMIL is neither the right format
> for playlists nor the right format to store subtitles.


It's all we have for subtitles using media streams that don't support
subtitling internally.  Certainly it offers solutions to problems such
as multi-language subtitles that are difficult to solve otherwise.

I am not saying that the SMIL grammar is great, but I am saying that
it's what we have to work with at the moment.

- Bill

> And no, the non-adoption of SMIL has nothing to do with players not
> supporting it. Quicktime and Real support it, so if it would be useful,
> _someone_ apart from people forced to use it would have done a
> presentation with it.
> 
> SMIL is a solution to a nonexistant problem.

What about the (multiple) accessibility problems?  What alternative
solution would you suggest for adding-on descriptive audio, subtitles,
and multiple synchronized text tracks (i.e. description in one channel,
audio transcript in the other) ?  And what format should
creators/editors of such content use ?

:-)

Bill

> Cheers,
> 
> Benjamin
> 
> PS: The above obviously is just MNSHO.
>