Closed-Caption compliance for iTunes 7.4

Check this site for an example app that creates closed captioning in QuickTime.

http://developer.apple.com/samplecode/ClosedCaptionImporter/index.html

Do you have the Developer Tools installed? If so, you can open it with Xcode to look at it. The importer is pre-built, though so you don't need the Tools to use it. Place "ClosedCaptionImporter.component" in your Library/QuickTime folder (I put mine in the main one, it may work in your local user library as well).

After that, you'll be able to open the Example.scc file in the QuickTime Player.

I had no idea that apps to create SCC files cost thousands!

Message was edited by: Kyn Drake

There's no captioning at the beginning of the file. You'll have to play it and at about 2 seconds, in the black you should see "Projector Running". You should also notice that along with the Closed Captioning track is a Timecode track.

From this page
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/resources/components.html
It mentions that QuickTime uses standard CEA-608 closed captions. Is that Line 21? (Excuse my lack of knowledge, I know a bit about the old way of creating text tracks, but this new "official" stuff, not so much)

Don't you need to pay a fee to use CC? A royalty fee...

Message was edited by: David M Brewer

I quickly looked at the source code for that ClosedCaptionImporter. Apparently, there's a (new?) 'cdat' atom that contains the actual CEA-608 bytes used for Closed Captions. An .scc file is just a text file that contains those byte values (as text) along with some time codes. The importer reads the text files, converts the text to bytes, and uses QuickTime calls to insert those bytes into a Closed Caption Track, which you can see in QuickTime Pro with Show Movie Properties.

(The ReadMe.rtf for the importer contains a link to a site with SCC tools, and from there is a link to details on the CEA-608 byte codes: http://www.geocities.com/mcpoodle43/SCCTOOLS/DOCS/SCCFORMAT.HTML )

QuickTime Player and iTunes will read those bytes, and act like a TV does: interpret those codes to display text. (Be sure to have "Show closed captioning when available" selected in Preferences before opening the file, otherwise it doesn't seem to work.) So great, what's the actual workflow so this is usable?

There may be free tools to convert a text script to SCC format. For example, on that first tools page, there's an example of the format supported by PAS2SCC, which is at least human-readable. So somehow you get your captions into SCC, you can use the importer to create the CC track, and you can use QTPro to copy the track into the movie. I'm fuzzy as to whether the 'cdat' has to be in a .mov, and not in a .m4v, and whether that's valid for a podcast.

Otherwise, you may need to use the QuickTime API to modify the track directly, and looking at that source code, it's not crazy difficult. You might even be able to make a complete app out of it, so that you can type in text, and have it do the CEA-608 encoding. And then if you charge less than the $9000 I saw for some other similar product, you might sell a few.

Would it be possible for one of you to upload a QuickTime file with captions embedded?

I'm really interested in getting Captions working as well, however I'm a Windows user (I know...boo) and the ClosedCaptionImporter component was only compiled for MacOS.

What I'd like to know is how the timecode and captioning track are stored in the video. Depending on their format, it may be possible to write the MOV Atoms directly to the file using a tool like AtomicParsely, which would bypass the need for the QuickTime Component all together.

I think the best workflow to add captions would be:
Aegisub -> ***/SSA/SRT -> CCASDI -> SCC -> AtomicParsley

For now, you mac users should at least be able to do:
SRT -> CCASDI -> QuickTime

SRT is a simple enough format that you can edit with a text editor. You may not get all the bells and whistles included in CEA-608 but it would probably be enough.

So if anyone could throw up a sample QuickTime caption file (megaupload, rapidshare, where ever), it would really help out to do more research.

You can easily create a subrip file and convert it to scc for free using SUBRIP2SCC.

http://www.geocities.com/mcpoodle43/SCCTOOLS/DOCS/SCCTOOLS.HTML