positioning closed captions for videos

Hi Simon,

I finally got in touch with the person who could answer questions about closed captions in Lectora. Technically, you should be able to use Timed Text Markup Language (TTML) tss:origin property to relocate the captions. But unfortunately, the current version of the JWPlayer (the Flash-based player that Lectora uses) doesn't seem to have the full set of TTML markup interpretation implemented. And it seems that tss:origin is one of those that is missing.

However, the Lectora developers are looking at implementing a new non-Flash based player in the near future that will be closed caption capable. It won't be ready for the version 16 release next month, but possibly for version 16.1.

In the meantime, you might try adding event cues to the video that trigger actions to show or change contents of text layered on top of the video. That's the best workaround I can offer right now.

Hi Wendy.

Thank you very much for your reply. I will try event cues.

Kind regards

Simon

Wendy,

Do you know of any workarounds to incorporate an HTML5 video player that is able to display closed captions in Lectora courses?

Deirdre

Hi Deirdre,

There are only two workarounds that I can think of. The first is what I offered to Simon above where you would add event cues to the video which trigger text to show and hide. Certainly not ideal, I know. The second would be to script it yourself using the HTML extensions in Lectora. I did find this article about how you might at least do the scripting part, if you are into that.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Apps/Build/Audio_and_video_delivery/Adding_captions_and_subtitles_to_HTML5_video

I have not tried this myself, so I don't have anything I could just pass along to you as an example. But... if you can wait about 2 months, I did get confirmation from the Lectora developers that the new HTML5 based media player will indeed be released with version 16.1 of Lectora. The new player will be closed caption capable. That will make it much easier than any workaround I could offer.

Hi Wendy,

For obvious reasons, I appreciate you're probably not able to provide specific dates for projected product updates. However in your post above, you mentioned that 16.1 would be pushed out in "about 2 months" and it's 2 months (almost to the day)

Utilizing the html player with closed captions is a requirement for the course I'm currently building, so it'd be great to know whether 16.1 is days away, or if there's still weeks/months before release. It'd be a shame to go to all the trouble of manually scripting an external player, only to receive an update a few days later that includes the functionality natively.

Thanks Wendy,

B.

undefined

Hi Benjamin G,

I cannot give you an exact date, but as far as I know it is still scheduled to be released this month.

Thanks Wendy! I'm in a position where I'm often pushed for explicit deadlines so I try not to do it myself :-P

I'll look forward to the update.