UPDATED 1/9 AT 5:20 CST WITH NEW VERSION INFO

A colleague of mine with the State of Minnesota asked me if I knew how to do close captioning of video for the web. Admittedly I did not, but that didn’t stop me from looking into it. Within a five minute search of Google, I found a link on the Law, Health Policy & Disability forum at the University of Iowa showing a proof of concept, that you can indeed take a video file and apply some level of close captioning to it using Flash.

To save you some time of hunting all the files down, I’ve put together an instruction page with a demo of how it works. The only grunt work you have to do is: acquire the exact length (in seconds) of your video file and create a close captioning text file based upon the example one I link to. You then just have to modify an XML file and you’re all set to go. See the instructions for details. (Version one had you passing a bunch of variables and it was kinda clunky to work with. In version two you’re able to put everything you need in a single XML file.)

I hope this helps you out. It’ll sure help me out when it comes time to provide close captioned videos for the State.

January 9, 2007, 4:48 pm

Filed under: Actionscript, Applications, Development, Websites

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