Solving technology problems, one at a time
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A colleague at work needed to know how to turn on captions in Windows Media Player. I started to write her a note explaining it, but needed to check exactly how to get to the setting since I knew how to do it in older versions but not 11.
This turned out to be just another opportunity to experience Microsoft’s creative approach to usability.
Here’s a snapshot of the the player. Note, there is no "File" menu, no Open command, nothing that appears useful unless you are purchasing music from their store or ripping from an old CD. And really, aren’t "Rip" and "Burn" SO 2006? Who even cares about ripping CD’s anymore?
Over the last couple of years, Microsoft Producer has become less and less of a viable option for synching powerpoint and video. Probably because of browser changes, it works on less browsers than before, and is no longer compatible even with Powerpoint 2007. So I went in search of a Flash-based replacement for MS Producer. I’ve found it in the Rich-Media-Project’s Rich-Media Pack I.
RMP I features 4 components: A Flash-Paper “player”, an FLV video player, a slide list and a media playlist. You create a flash-paper version of the powerpoint or word document, then synch it to the video with XML. The playlist is generated by another xml file, and the captions are created using a third XML file.
The only thing missing is an easy way to create the XML files, so I am creating templates for the captions and slide list XML files in Subtitle workshop. Below is the code for the Custom Format file for the captions:
Subtitle Workshop, by Urusoft is free captioning software (donation-ware) which allows you to easily transcribe and edit captions and output the resulting file to many different formats. I’ll be focusing on Windows Media format here, but you will find this a useful tool for captioning DVD’s, Quicktime, and Flash as well.
Note: A much more complete exposition of the concepts summarized in this tutorial is available to members of the Elearning Guild in the article A Guide to Captioning Windows Media and QuickTime Using Subtitle Workshop
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When using Subtitle Workshop for creating Quicktime captions I found that the settings supplied with the program for Quicktime are incorrect. This can be fixed by creating a new Custom format and saving it in the Custom Formats folder inside the Subtitle Workshop folder.
Continue readingIf you purchase the MS Producer resource disk available here HERE you will find it contains an example of a Captioned Video template, along with this white paper captioning in Producer (MS Word format)
I found the one captioning template on the CD (captioned video with fixed-size slides) was a good beginning but quickly realized I needed several others. I made two more, which can be downloaded below. To use these templates, unzip them, and put the entire folders into the Producer templates directory on your C drive.
Within Producer, they will show up within the Templates area as:
“Standard Captioned Audio – Resizable Slides” Download Zip File (36K)
and “Standard Captioned Video (320×240) – Resizable Slides” Download Zip File (36K))
In Subtitle Workshop, trying to use the Join tool to join two SAMI files and recalculate the timings would result in this error every time: The following error (EConvertError) was derived from object TfrmJoin (frmJoin):
Continue readingCreating SAMI files for Windows Media Player is now quite easy, using Subtitle Workshop, but I had a lot of trouble getting captions to play correctly. They would play just fine locally on my hard drive, but once I put them on a webserver, they wouldn’t play at all.
That made me think it was a path problem, but finding the exact solution was tough.
Here’s my canned solution for embedding a windows media player in a web page, adapted from Microsoft’s instructions which do not seem to work for me.
The example shown here is for a Windows2K web server, with the video being streamed off a windows media streaming server.
I started with instructions from this page.
I tried using their clever little selector which lets you change styles and languages, but got a lot of javascript errors, although it mostly worked. I gave up on it after a while, and simplified things. You need 4 files:
Here are the steps I use to create a new captioning file in Subtitle Workshop. Create a new file. (File–>New Subtitle–>Save–>Select a format, then double click its icon–>in Save AS dialog, Browse to chosen location,
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