|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
Finally, Caption Playback |
| |
Posted On: 30-12-2009 |
214 Views |
By now, you may have noticed that we've just introduced a small but
significant new feature that many of us have long awaited: playback of
captions and subtitles! If you haven't tried it yet, you can go to this page, select a captioned video, and while playing it you can click on the ![[CC]](http://www.google.com/images/cc.gif) symbol to turn captions on and off.
Although
many of us are responsible for making this possible, it's particularly
meaningful to me because I'm not only an engineer fortunate enough to
work on Google Video -- I'm also deaf. In some ways this reminds me of
when closed-captioning (CC) was first introduced; before that, little
on TV made sense and the only movies worth paying for were foreign
films, because those were the only ones with subtitles! I now have the
same sense of hope that I did then, when you could finally see visible
progress and knew for sure that however long it took to perfect things,
we really were on the way.
But I won't kid you -- there are
still light-years to go, and I'm painfully aware of how limited our
first implementation is. For example, you'll notice that it only works
for videos using our Flash player (in a browser); US viewers may be
bothered that our captions look more like subtitles than TV captions,
and non-US viewers may be baffled by the [CC] symbol; and so on and on,
not even counting the bugs that infect all new features. But most
importantly by far, only a very small fraction of videos are currently
captioned. Nor is the quality always good.
However, this is
exactly the same problem faced by the early proponents of CC, and it is
this very issue which has compelled us to start with baby mis-steps
sooner, rather than a giant leap of perfection later. Now that viewers
can see the results, we hope that more people will be inspired to
caption more videos, and that other services will be encouraged to
support similar capabilities. The potential applications here for
search quality, automatic translation, and speech recognition should
also become more obvious.
Every time I watch TV I'm thankful to
all of the many people who first developed and brought
closed-captioning to fruition, and wish I could have helped them. So
it's enormously gratifying that Google Video has given me an
opportunity to help carry on their work into new domains.
And you, too, can help! Please do send us
your comments, bug reports, or suggestions; whether or not you think
they're new, your collective feedback will be invaluable in helping us
promote these capabilities and guide our decisions on which features
need to be done next.
-- Ken Harrenstien
|
|
| |
| User
Comments |
| |
|
There are no comments posted for this article. Click here to become first one to post a comment. |
|
| |
|
| |
| Related
Articles |
| There are
no related article.
|
|
| |
|
|
| |
|
| |
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
