Solving technology problems, one at a time
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 readingProducer has a bookmarking feature that makes it start up wherever you last left off. Unfortunately, this behavior simply confuses many of our users, who barely notice the Table of Contents. It turns out you
Continue readingI have had trouble getting Windows Media Player to consistently seek to markers embedded in the video itself, but it does seem to seek to specific timings.
Some sample code is provided below:
A client gave me a powerpoint presentation recently that contained a lot of symbols: arrows, greater-than-or-equal-to signs, and the like. They showed up fine in the powerpoint, but once incorporated into an MS Producer presentation, and published, they disappeared, or changed into letters.
It turns out the reason for this is that fonts are embedded into powerpoint presentations, but Producer is creating HTML pages, which of course are dependent on the end viewer’s computer for fonts, and on browser options for default font preferences.
When inserting symbols in powerpoint, (on a PC) it is not immediately obvious that you are switching fonts. By default, when you select “Insert Symbol” the font that comes up highlighted in the dialog is “Symbol” which does not always show up in a finished Producer presentation. Select another font, like Arial or Times New Roman and choose one of their symbols – they have almost as many.
The alternative would be to position graphics of the symbols in place of temperamental text characters. However, this isn’t such a great solution, since you can’t place inline graphics inside text boxes, so the symbols won’t stay in postion, especially if the font size varies a bit depending on the user’s computer.
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,
Continue readingI’m not quite ready to say it’s the Holy Grail of closed captioning, but Subtitle Workshop by Urusoft.net for Windows is really pretty good. It is not buggy, like Magpie, and it saves to any of about 20 different formats, including SAMI.
It can be downloaded from HERE.
Continue readingSynching Sami files using MS Producer:
I received the MS Producer resources disk in the mail, and it contained one example of a template that has a captioning window below the video area.
To use it, you need to create a “SAMI” file, which is a text file with HTML-style tags to describe the captioning styles and timing for each line of caption text.
Lacking anything better at the moment, I use Producer to do the synching: Play your video in Producer for the length of one phrase, stop it, note the timing, and use “control-tab” to switch to a text editor where the SAMI file is being edited.
I found this procedure a bit slow, and had some problems with getting the exact timing right, but it does work. Complete instructions for captioning with Producer are available as a (Windows-only .exe file !) download HERE
A non .exe resource for understanding SAMI files is HERE
Continue readingIn the web environment I develop for – a busy hospital – having some kind of captioning on presentations that include an audio track is not optional. Videos and narrated presentations are watched in common areas, and it’s not always possible to locate a pair of headphones or even convenient to use them if there are other things going on in the room that need to be heard.
There are also a few people with hearing disabilities that need the captions. So I’ve been searching for a captioning method for all our streaming video that is efficient, and creates web-based video that is compatible with Windows and Macintosh computers.
Although the Virage system will be ideal for this (voice recognition and screen-scraping create searchable, linked chunks of text associated with the exact locations in the video where they occurred.), it will not be in place soon enough.
Creating captions on VHS/DVD formats would be a nice capability, as well.
Continue readingA long awaited update to Microsoft Producer is here. Producer 2003 is available from: Final Release Candidate of Producer 2003 Producer is a free app that allows you to synch Powerpoint presentations with video, html,
Continue reading