Re: Ideas and graph

[Bill Haneman <bill haneman sun com>]

On Tue, 2002-09-17 at 12:00, Calum Benson wrote:
> On Mon, 2002-09-16 at 19:44, Xavier Bestel wrote:
> 
> > They exist. AVI and especially WMV and RM files can embed markers,
> > titles, URL, and any kind of text timestamped in the file.
> 
> /me mutters something about being able to handle accesible streaming
> content with audio descriptions, closed-captioning etc... unfortunately
> there aren't really many standards in that area yet AFAIK-- QuickTime,
> Real and WMP all have their own proprietary ones at the moment I think. 
> But having a media player that can handle them as they emerge would be a
> seriously cool killer feature.  (Bill, do you know of any open standards
> in this area?)

THe only truly open standards for media 'captioning' AFAIK are "SMIL",
which is a synchronization framework but of course it can be used for
captioning, etc. since that's what captioning really "is", a second
media stream synchronized with a primary one.

The common "non-proprietary" or "less proprietary" standards like the
MPEG standards unfortunately don't cater to captioning and embedded
sidebands.  So for these media types, I believe that synchronization via
a meta-stream like SMIL is the best answer.

This is certainly a very important area for accessibility, and for
individuals and businesses, artists, etc. who actually are "content
creators", this is actually the most important area of accessibility. 
Right now we don't have a very good way of creating accessible content
on the GNOME platform, or even playing it back.

regards,

Bill

> Cheeri,
> Calum.
> 
> -- 
> CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
> mailto:calum benson sun com            GNOME Desktop Group
> http://ie.sun.com                      +353 1 819 9771
> 
> Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems
>