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Closed-Caption compliance for iTunes 7.4

iTunes 7.4 now has support for closed-captions. As I produced a CC podcast, I would love to dump the CC sprite for the new functionality but have not found a document with specifications for the text track nor a store video or movie to buy it.

Do you know of any store movie/video that has it? Do you know where can I find the specs for the text track?

Thanks!

PowerMac G5, Mac OS X (10.4.1)

Posted on Sep 6, 2007 1:37 PM

65 replies

Sep 11, 2007 11:36 AM in response to kyc

Thanks for referring the tool. When TV supports CC in the near future, this will be a great tool to add subtitles as captions (not burned-in) as it was developed to covert ripped subtitles into captions as SCC. I hope a program such as HandBrake can incorporated it. That would be very good!

In my case, the content I want to caption is the one I create. The (Annotation Edit)->(Compressor 3) solution is the best I've found so far but still opened for free alternatives or work-flows.

I plan to create a video in the next couple of weeks (in my podcast) to include the supported closed-captions. I just wish the TV gets an update to display them.

kyc

Level 1

5 points

Sep 11, 2007 12:09 PM in response to Israel Melendez

I'm sorry, I should have been more specific.

I meant to say that subtitling software that edit and create subrip files are available for free (Jubler - http://www.jubler.org/). You can use them to write captions for your created content in srt format and then convert it to scc using SUBRIP2SCC.

Workflow: Jubler -> SUBRIP2SCC -> compressor 3

Message was edited by: kyc

Sep 11, 2007 12:24 PM in response to kyc

That does make a lot of sense. Thanks a lot for the suggested workflow. I will definitely try it out soon.

Israel

Sep 16, 2007 1:16 PM in response to Israel Melendez

Here are some samples of Podcast with Closed-Captioning made with MacCaption.

http://www.multimediatest.com/Site/Podcast/Podcast.html

Sep 16, 2007 3:21 PM in response to supdvdman

I new about from a while back but now that you mention it, it really looks like the simplest workflow of all. Ihave to give them that. The con is that I do not see how can a podcaster can invest $5,995.00-8,995.00 for the captioning software. I'd buy buy a specialized version made just for podcasts for about $300 or less. $9K is way out of most podcasters' budget... if we have any at all.

Thanks a lot for the link. I am downloading the instruction video.

Sep 16, 2007 3:24 PM in response to David M Brewer

Nope. It's a standard and regulated for broadcasting by the FCC. Current laws do not apply to internet video and a lot of video devices... just TVs. Displays known as monitors (without tuners) are also exempt.

Sep 16, 2007 3:43 PM in response to Israel Melendez

Don't forget to help us find the first captioned video from the iTunes store. Thanks!

Kyn Drake

Level 7

21,585 points

Sep 16, 2007 5:27 PM in response to kenoodle

I finally took a look at the format, and were I a programmer, I imagine you could take a Chapter Text track as a text file and run it through a parser that could convert it into an .SCC file.

For example a line that reads

THIS IS CLOSED CAPTIONED

would become something like

5448 4953 2049 5320 434c 4f53 4544 2043 4150 5449 4f4e 4544

Throw in some formatting and timing commands (haven't figured those out yet) and you'd have

00:00:01:00 9420 942c 942f 9420 9152 97a2 91ae 5448 4953 2049 5320 434c 4f53 4544 2043 4150 5449 4f4e 4544

Now, it wouldn't be anything NEARLY as special as those expensive tools, but if I've already got a lot of content with Chapter Tracks that I can just export as text, it'd be the next best thing for an adventurous podcaster 🙂

Sep 16, 2007 7:33 PM in response to Israel Melendez

What do you think a good price would be for them to introduce a podcast only software?

They do check their e-mail info@cpcweb.com

Sep 16, 2007 7:52 PM in response to supdvdman

If it supports all Apple device resolutions and incorporate chapter marking without a third application (i.e. AppleTV, iPod and iPhone resolutions and properly sets a poster frame to a .M4V file), I'd say I won't think about it twice for $300. Remember there is currently a $385 solution from Germany that does more than we actually need, is a bit complex and requires a secondary step with Apple's Compressor 3. A license agreement can be used to regulate its use (not for broadcasting, etc.).

Sep 16, 2007 8:07 PM in response to Kyn Drake

That's very good! I found this site on the standard and it is explained here: http://www.geocities.com/mcpoodle43/SCCTOOLS/DOCS/SCCFORMAT.HTML

It says: "The data is made up of two-byte hexidecimal words, separated from each other by spaces and from the timecode by a tab character. The data uses only seven out of every eight bits of each byte, with the high bit used to satisfy odd parity--adding up all the bits has to result in an odd number, or the closed caption decoder will reject the byte as corrupt data.".......

Kyn Drake

Level 7

21,585 points

Sep 17, 2007 12:08 AM in response to Israel Melendez

That's where I was. Looking down further, it seems to make more sense than it did yesterday. 🙂

A lot of the conversion from a chapter track would involve simple character substitution. The biggest difference would be that a Chapter track sort of formats itself where you have to manually place each character using the SCC method. If you want to try hacking out your own closed captions, try this software I found... Hex Fiend.

http://ridiculousfish.com/hexfiend/

Using this, typing the text in the right hand side gives you the character codes on the left. Copy those out, format them as expected by the SCC format and 426f 6227 7320 796f 7572 2075 6e63 6C65 ! (Copy that into the app for the decode 🙂

Sep 17, 2007 10:41 AM in response to Israel Melendez

I do believe that the markers and poster frames stay in the Quicktime. So if you have a quicktime or *.mp4 or *.m4a it just puts the Caption skin on it but doesn't touch anything else about it. Unlike compressor it has to recompress again to put the captions in it.

Sep 18, 2007 11:52 AM in response to Kyn Drake

For those interested in testing captioned material, I found a couple of samples from this site:
http://www.multimediatest.com/Site/Podcast/Podcast.html

dcox

Level 1

0 points

Oct 8, 2007 8:31 AM in response to kyc

This thread has been super helpful. I was just wondering if anyone else has tried this workflow?

I gave it a shot, and I was able to produce captions with it, but I had to land on a Windows based system to use the SUBRIP2CC application. I could see that the app is basically a perl script with a DOS wrapper around it, so I tried running the perl script directly. It took input, and made output, but it had errors about the length of the captions. I found that I could get rid of those errors by changing the .srt file's line endings FROM windows format to either Mac or UNIX, but I was not able to get it to produce anything other than a .scc file with the content:
Scenarist_SCC V1.0

00:00:00:00 942c 942c

I assume this is some sort of header info for the file, or an error message. I can rattle on, but really I am wondering if anyone has gotten the SUBRIP2SCC script working on a Mac.

Thanks.

Closed-Caption compliance for iTunes 7.4