Hello everyone.
Before I get into this and see if anyone might have some advice on some of the issues I'm trying to work out. First let me tell you why I'm working on this project. I'll put the "Reason" in a quote so if you don't want to read it all you can jump down to below the quote box and just find out what problem I need help with. But I feel the reason I'm doing this is important to know.
First of all I am deaf so that's what got me to thinking about this issue in the first place. Many people don't realize how many deaf and profoundly heard of hearing people there are out there. According to the National Institutes of Health, between 500,000 and 750,000 people in the U.S. are "profoundly" deaf, and 32.5 million American adults have some degree of hearing loss.
Here's the problem I'm trying to help out with. It has to do with subtitles (or Closed Captioning) on internet videos. You can read this article for more details on this but here's the basic problem that my project addresses. Associations such as NAD (National Association of the Dead) have pushed for laws regarding captioning. IN fact all Televisions made after the year 1998 with a screen of 13" or larger must have the ability to display closed captioning. Years ago we had to plug a box into the TV to get CC. The problem was it took about 25 years for that to finally happen.
Now here's the issue. Today many TV stations (such as ABC, NAB, FOX, etc...) broadcast shows over the internet. A few of them have subtitles but not many. So we deaf people really can't enjoy internet TV and movies. So now they are trying to get internet video into that law. No, they are not expecting sites like youtube to have subtitles. Just the major networks.
Right now if I wanted to watch any of these shows with subtitles I could download the video. Then I can search the internet for the subtitles of that show and add it to the downloaded video. That seems simple enough but the problem is you can't download the TV episodes.
So here's my little solution to that problem. Well, it's not going to fix the problem completely but I do think it could make things a little better. I'm creating a "Subtitles Player". This will not play the video but only display the subtitles. This subtitles player can be opened and positioned under the streaming video.
Click here to see an image to help illustrate what I mean.
To further explain. If you go to this page and you'll find a streaming movie.
Go to this page you can download the subtitles to that movie.
So you'd play the subtitles file on the subtitles player and position it over the streaming video of that movie.
I created a 2 hour video with nothing but a black image for a background. So the 2 hour video shows nothing but this black background image. I converted the video to FLV to make it a smaller file.
I didn't know how to make a video player that supports subtitles files (Usually they are .srt files). So I looked around and found one called Total Video player. this player supports subtitles.
Now my plan worked great in that the video will display the subtitles just like I hoped it would. I can now open the player over a browser window that is streaming a movie or show and read the subtitles. Click here to see a screen shot of this..
It's not very easy to use like that though because your eyes have to keep jumping between the player and the video. This brings me to the biggest problem I'm having right now.
If I shrink the subtitle player down and position it under the streaming video. The subtitles also shrink. Click here to see an image of what I'm talking about..
Does anyone know how I can change this so when I resize the player the video does not change size? and the subtitles will not shrink? My goal is more like the very first image I linked to above. If you download the total video player I linked to above you'll be able to see the files it contains (NOt a large file).
Any help or advice would be very appreciated.
Thanks for your time.
Ron Jaon