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From SubtitlesWiki
This wiki is primarily intended as a repository for the collaborative subtitling addon for Firefox, which is under development.
Current code is in my personal SVN: http://code.google.com/p/felipesanches/source/browse/#svn/trunk/addon-subtitles
You can manually edit this wiki, but please stick to the syntax of the SRT format, otherwise it will probably break for users of the Firefox addon.
Contents |
Video Tutorial
A video overview of the main features of the WikiSubs firefox addon.
- on Youtube with english subtitles
- OGG video (we can use the addon itself to create collaborative subtitles for other languages)
Felipe Sanches
Make subtitling trivial and collaborators will surely come
The rationale behind WikiSubs Firefox addon is to provide a boost in video accessibility by making it trivial to contribute subtitles. With the "pause-edit-play" user interface we are bringing together (in a non-intrusive way) two user experiences that used to be separated by a huge gap: subtitling consumption and production. Before, one needed to have the technical skills, time and initiative to test, choose, install, learn and actually use subtitling tools. Then it would require an extra effort in order to submit its contributions back to the subtitling community.
We believe in a web based on open standards. The audio&video support in html5 is a great step in that direction. Further than that, we also envision a collaboration environment that will encourage more people to participate and, thus, shorten the language barriers of video content.
FAQ
How do we specify the wiki site in the extension once we install it?
The wiki repository used by the extension is hardcoded to http://www.wstr.org/subs/ at the moment. In a future version we can add a settings panel to specify alternative wiki repositories.
What format the wiki site is expecting?
Subtitles are stored as SRT.
How does it handle multiple available subtitles?
The list of subtitles available to a certain video is stored in the master article with the name Subtitles/URL/<here-goes-the-url-to-the-video-file>
So, for the "WikiSubs Overview" video which is stored at http://www.wstr.org/videos/WikiSubs_Overview.ogg the master article name is
Subtitles/URL/http://www.wstr.org/videos/WikiSubs_Overview.ogg
The content of the master article is a list of wiki links to each available subtitle-article just like this:
*[[Subtitles/URL/http://www.wstr.org/videos/WikiSubs_Overview.ogg/ptBR|Português (BR)]] *[[Subtitles/URL/http://www.wstr.org/videos/WikiSubs_Overview.ogg/enUS|English]]
What can we expect for future versions of this addon?
There are some features I'd like to add in future releases.
- Alternative repository settings
- Multiple repository sources
- A "translate" menu option so that people can start translation from within the addon without having to edit the master article manually
- A similar feature for adding new subtitles
- Support for wiki redirects. This will allow reuse of subtitles for the same video hosted in various different URLs. This will also allow reuse of subtitles for different encodings of the same video content (will need to store the time-offset needed to sync the subtitles).
- Registered wiki-edits. Current implementation edits anonymously.
- Spam-protection
- A feature similar to "Youtube Annotations"
- Support for the html5 audio element
Technical Information
While implementing this, I have noticed that part of the functionality could be incorporated into a future version of Firefox while other things should remain as optional features to be installed as an addon.
For instance, while the wiki features fit better in an addon, Firefox actually needs an user interface for subtitles selection and display because some ogg videos might have subtitles embedded in it:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=481529 Bug 481529 - Support for Kate overlay streams in <video> tag
During the development of this addon I have refactored portions of it and I have provided some patches to Firefox. User ogg.k.ogg.k@googlemail.com has merged my patch with his own and we've got a prototype ui for managing subtitles embedded in ogg.
Here is the bug where the refactored version of this addon has been first published as a patch:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=515898 Bug 515898 - implement UI for subtitles on html5 video/audio
On svn revision 66 the user interface code was refactored. Before that, we were using DOM methods to dinamically construct all of the ui. Now the ui code is more legible and is more easily extendable.
Felipe "Juca" Sanches
juca@members.fsf.org
Known Bugs
As of svn r58 (the version of the XPI I have submitted to the extendfirefox3.5 contest) there are some known bugs:
- fixed in svn r63: it does not detect the video URL when you open the video file directly in Firefox (instead of viewing the video embedded in an HTML5 webpage)
- fixed in svn r63: it only detects the video URL of the first occurrence of the source tag inside a video tag. It should read all source tags and also the src attribute in the video tag.
- subtitles do not display correctly when the width attribute is used in a video. (workaround: zoom the page and the text will show up. very strange! maybe a xul:textbox rendering bug?)
- it won't work if you are logged in to the wiki.
Related material
Interview
During the MozCamp Chile event, Guillermo Movia (from Mozilla Argentina) has interviewed me (Felipe Sanches). The ogg vorbis file is here. Questions are in spanish, answers are in brazilian portuguese. Soon we hope to add english subtitles, but I need to implement html5 audio support first.
