Internationalization

[jronallo]

Description

Internationalization: Audio streams in welsh / english, along with subtitles in Welsh/English.

Proposed Solutions

Embedded textual content handled via JSON-LD. Options:

1. Single annotation with a Choice of different resource, by language, as the body.
2. Layer per-language with annotations with a single body.
3. Refer to subtitles resource in existing format as the body of an annotation
4. ?? expose existing srt/vtt files and burned-in captions in info.json? (or TTML)

For situations when there are more than one video associated with a canvas, it might be useful to associate the subtitles (etc) with the canvas as individual annotations.
For situations when there is a single media stream, it would be easier to use existing subtitle resources and have the player render them. → Reference from info.json to different language subtitle files (outside of presentation API) Subtitles that should be rendered by the viewing application in a separate window/panel should be annotations on the canvas rather than a subtitle file. Transcription (with speaker identification) != captioning SRT “spec” http://srt-subtitles.com/ & https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SubRip - very simple entries: entry number, time range, text (with limited HTML)

Use case for zones: associate timestamps of subtitles with the zone, and then associate zone with the time frame of multiple canvases. Can associate annotations with the canvas. Link from video-info.json to a zone.

Additional Background

Source: BL workshop notes Interest: 100%

[jronallo]

By @brion

The notion of zones & synced canvas annotations for subtitles should perhaps be broken out separately from the 'native' subtitle & multi-language audio issue. They have overlap in use, but will need to be treated differently I think.

A few other things to consider on audio:

• A/V file may have multiple audio tracks in separate languages (for instance, a rip of a multilingual DVD) - may need to be able to select an audio track explicitly? Is this reliable enough in HTML5 video playback? (I think so but have not tested)
• could choose to ship separate audio tracks with a silent base video track (commonly done for MPEG-DASH / HLS these days) -- could hide this behind a MPEG-DASH/HLS manifest file, or explicitly list the files (could require direct use of MSE by the player, which will not work on iOS Safari, whereas using HLS would work)

[azaroth42]

From #59, the current decision is to go with option 1 -- a single Annotation with a Choice of resources.