Closed Captioning for Online Video
Captioning and Subtitling on DVD
Captioning on DVD is similar to subtitling in appearance. The captioning approach adds the ability to turn the text on and off at any time desired, as opposed to only selecting a language at the beginning of the disc. With subtitles, TIFF images containing subtitle text are keyed into video by the DVD player. For captioning, the DVD player actually inserts the closed-captioning data into line 21 of the SD video output. The viewer’s television then decodes and displays the captions. For HD, unfortunately, Blu-ray did not make accommodations for closed captioning, but it does carry the DVD-standard capacity for subtitling in eight languages.
Status
As 50,000 channels flood the web, the internet is revolutionizing the way people feel about captioning, languages, and subtitling. In 5 years, at any time and on any day, billions of people around the world will be watching global internet channels from 300 countries, many subtitled and/or captioned in dozens of languages, and a new, global marketplace will explode before our eyes. As for those who cannot see the explosion, audio description for the blind technology, perhaps as text-to-speech, is in the works.