Captions plugin

This plugin displays closed captions on top of the video. These captions can come from an external file (in Timedtext or Subrip format) or as metadata from the video itself (as MPEG-4 Timedtext or Captionate events).

This plugin is compatible with version 4.1 of the player. For 4.3+, the plugin will place a button in the controlbar. For 4.5+, the plugin will place the button in the dock (if dock=true is set).

Examples

Here is an example of the captions plugin in action. Below is the string of flashvars used:

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

file=/player/testing/files/corrie.flv&plugins=captions&captions.file=/player/testing/files/corrie.xml

Here is another example of the captions plugin with a video that has built-in captions (MPEG4 Timedtext). The dock feature of the player is turned on, so the button ends up in the dock. Also, the captions.back feature is turned on.

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

file=/player/testing/files/bunny.mp4&plugins=captions&dock=false&captions.back=true&dock=true

Configuration

The plugin is loaded with the flashvar plugins=captions. This will automatically load the latest version of the plugin straight off our servers. It offers four additional flashvars:

• captions.back (false): If set to true, the plugin will render a semitransparent background for the captions, instead of a black outline.
• captions.file (undefined): - Location of the XML/SRT file to load the closed captions from. You won't have to set it if you have captions embedded in the video.
• captions.fontsize (14): Size of the captions font. At its default, about 70 characters fit on a single line (which is the broadcast default).
• captions.state (true): Set this to false to turn off the captions by default.

Here's an example of both a Timedtext XML file and a Subrip text file.

Note that caption files (both XML and SRT) are subject to the Crossdomain security restrictions of Flash. This means that a videoplayer on one domain cannot load captions from another domain. It can be fixed by placing a crossdomain.xml file at the server the captions are loaded from.

Playlists

Captions can also be placed in playlists, by leveraging the JWPlayer namespace. Use the jwplayer:captions element name for this. Here is an example of an RSS feed with one video that contains captions:

<rss version="2.0" xmlns:jwplayer="http://developer.longtailvideo.com/trac/wiki/FlashFormats">
  <channel>
    <title>Example RSS feed with jwplayer extensions</title>
    <item>
      <title>FLV Video</title>
      <link>http://www.bigbuckbunny.org/</link>
      <description>Big Buck Bunny is a short animated film by the Blender Institute, part of the Blender Foundation.</description>
      <enclosure url="../../testing/files/bunny.flv" type="video/x-flv" length="1192846" />
      <jwplayer:captions>files/captions.xml</jwplayer:captions>
    </item>
  </channel>
</rss>

The captions.file flashvar will be ignored when a playlist is used.

Source code

The source code of this plugin can be obtained in a zip (click the zip links at the bottom) or through Subversion:

svn co http://developer.longtailvideo.com/svn/plugins/captions

If you don't have a Subversion client, check out Tortoise (Windows) or SC Plugin (MAC).

You don't need Adobe Flash to modify this plugin. Instead, you can edit the plugin with any text editor you like. The plugin can be compiled with the free, cross-platform MXMLC compiler. See our plugin compiling overview for more info.