More Player Customization of Subtitles/Closed Captions

[ghost]

Some suggestions for improvements to subtitles, primarily based on Youtube.

First of all, a small but really handy feature is that youtube allows you to click and drag subtitles to "float" around anywhere inside the player's frame. This would be amazing for the sake of not accidentally obscuring videos, and in the case of non-fullscreen players, it may even be a good idea to let the user have the subtitles outside of the frame.

In addition, youtube has a lot of options for customizing subtitles which can be incredibly important for accessibility for a bunch of reasons. Those, in total, are:

• [ ] Font family
• [ ] Font color
• [ ] Font size
• [ ] Background color
• [ ] Background opacity
• [ ] Window color
• [ ] Window opacity
• [ ] Character edge style
• [ ] Font opacity

"Window" in this case means the entire box which subtitles will be contained within.

It doesn't seem super complex for this sort of customization to be supported, though we do see the potential for conflict in some cases with the possible support of .ass files, as suggested in https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/issues/845#issuecomment-408267081.

If this implementation happens, our personal suggestion is that user selections of subtitle features override the choices made in the subtitle file. For example, in the case of someone making unreadably small subtitles, a user can choose to make them readably large again as needed.

[rigelk]

The main issue here is that there is no editing library or editor in the open, that we could integrate. And starting from scratch to write such an editor is a multiple-months task. With the added maintenance of the editor itself once developed, that would be too high a cost/benefit ratio over telling users to use a proper desktop application to edit SSA files.

EDIT: I misunderstood the issue ; if it's just about modifying existing subtitles' appearance and not their content/timestamp, it's indeed much simpler and doesn't need an editor :)

[Chocobozzz]

In fact videojs has this kind of feature: you can open a modal and customize the subtitles/captions (font-size etc). We just need to add it in our player.

[george110765]

I would second the Font Size issue... I cannot understand how the code has the speed of playback function but ommits font size. This is essential for accessibility of the visually impared and people who use mobile phones or otehr smaller screens to watch videos with subtitles. We are currently having to take a step back from the Extinction Rebellion Implementation of Peer tube as our viewers wont be able to read the subtiles in russian or chinese or even Spainish due to the single small text font available. at the very least a choice of small medium and large should be available!!!

[Chocobozzz]

I cannot understand how the code has the speed of playback function but ommits font size.

For many different reasons.

Just add custom CSS to your instance in the administration configuration panel:

.vjs-text-track-cue {
  font-size: 60px !important;
}

[george110765]

Would there be a mobile or tablet CSS and a desktop one as on my own website ? as the size issue really only affects mobile users with smaller screens. so going from 60 to 80px would probably be a decent fix for time being until a menu systems was implemented but on a desktop systems this might actually cause subtitles to overrun :(

btw thanks for getting back so quickly on this I have passed it on to our admin.