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On Feb 6, 2013, at 4:16 PM, John Wynstra wrote: > I have been asked to find out whether there are software or hardware > solutions for on-the-fly closed captioning. We currently work with > University IT production house on campus to perform this task. I'm not > involved in any aspect of this at this time, but have been asked to > investigate. > > Workflow is like this: > 1) purchase a separate VHS copy of movie for captioning purpose (license > issues I believe) > 2) view show and write a transcript (probably time consuming) > 3) Campus IT production creates a closed captioned digital copy using > transcript and movie. [trimmed] > Thoughts? It would never get you full closed captioning. It might get you subtitles, but true closed captioning also includes comments about other audio (background music, dogs barking, singing vs. mumbling vs. normal speech) Some of the more elaborate ones that I've seen will specifically move the text around on the screen so that they're not blocking important visual items. (that might've been on a DVD, and not standard closed captioning; much of my experience was in hanging out with folks from Gallaudet during undergrad and one of my dad's ex-girlfriends who only had partial hearing, but this was all in the mid to late 1990s) If you watch most news programs these days, they seem to use some sort of automatic closed captioning, as it's just awful. Lots of homophone confusion, random phonetic misspellings, etc. ... I would think that something that might be more productive, as you're dealing with existing published media and not stuff that you're generating yourself, would be to see if there exists some cooperative library of closed captioning, and if there isn't, make one. (so that people can submit time-tagged text to go with a given ISBN for a VHS or DVD) ... and a quick search seems to suggest that one exists; the Alternate Media eXchange Database: http://www.amxdb.net/ It seems there's also an 'OpenSubtitles' player which isn't resitricted to educational institutions, but as it's all torrent files and looks like many other torrent trackers, I'm afraid to download them (for fear it's got the video included). -Joe