Tag: Windows Media Player

A brief complaint about Microsoft Windows Media Player!

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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?

ifLooksLikethis.jpg

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Updated tutorial on captioning Windows Media

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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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Closed Captioning Part II, Synching SAMI files using MS Producer

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Synching 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

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