Closed caption is a text that is displayed often at the bottom of a video display that transcribes speech and other relevant sounds. As the video plays, caption describes all significant audio content and non-speech information, such as the identity of speakers and their manner of speaking, along with music or sound effects using words or symbols.
Closed captioning symbolized as CC, allows people who are deaf or hard of hearing to read a transcript or dialog of the audio portion of a video, film, or other presentation.
Aside from the deaf, other people can benefit from closed captioning. They are:
The term "closed" in closed captioning means that not all viewers see the captions—only those who decode or activate them. This distinguishes from "open captions," where all viewers see the captions, calling permanently visible captions in a video, film, or other medium "open", "burned-in", or "hardcoded" captions.
The purpose of this page is to show examples of video files with an embedded and standalone closed caption (CC) formats. This demonstration uses the 1:32 minutes video clip TV Patrol News Interview of PWAG members during the Baguio City Workshop held last February 19, 2007.
There are two media formats that can be used in creating closed captions. One is the Synchronized Accessible Media Interchange or SAMI developed by Microsoft with the sole purpose of being compatible with their Windows Media Player (.wmv) format. The .smi file is created to synchronize with the video.
The other one is Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language or (SMIL). It is a W3C Recommended XML markup language for describing multimedia presentations. SMIL is considered as an industry standard. This language can be used on other non-Microsoft popular formats like RealPlayer (.rm), Apple Quicktime (.mov) or MPEG (.mpg or .mp4) files. It creates an .sml file also to synchronize with the video.
Windows Media Player does not support audio descriptions at this time. So the closed caption appears outside the screen and can only be synchronized as an object embedded format in a web page. Realplayer and Quicktime formats place the closed caption inside the screen.
The free software being used to create the closed caption is Magpie 2.0 created by the The Carl and Ruth Shapiro Family National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM). It is a research and development facility dedicated to the issues of media and information technology for people with disabilities in their homes, schools, workplaces, and communities.
You can either choose between embedded as an object file that appears inside the browser or the non-embedded one that is viewed on a separate media player. The <object> tag is used to embed the video. It is considered as a standards compliant format. However, video formats using the <embed> tags are not standards compliant and are not advisable to use.
Select from the list to view closed captions using various video formats:
If you will select the external player format, make sure that you have a Realplayer Media installed in your computer. If you don't have one, then you can download the free RealPlayer file here.