Putting subtitles/captions on your movies

No matter in what language or what format you have your content, you can without any problem put SAMI captions on it.





Akmal Khan Sapay

.2003.07.19.


What are captions/subtitles

Windows closed captions can also called subtitles in more familiar way. You have certainly and seen subtitles on your DVD movies – lines of text in a different language appearing on the bottom of the screen and completely synchronized with the movie.

What we will be creating in this guide isn’t exactly DVD subtitles but something we call SMIL (Synchronized Accessible Media Interchange) which is played back by windows media player.

It is a Microsoft product and like other types of captioning, SAMI scripts provide an alternative form of audio and video content for users who have hearing impairments or ones who don’t understand English.

But it’s not limited to captioning just English content: if you have your content in any Language like Pashto, Arabic, Spanish, French etc then you can put English captions on your content and make it available for people who don’t understand the language that is used in your content.

Besides, SMIL captioning isn’t limited to a single format but you can even put SAMI captions to many formats like AVI, WMA, WMV, MPEG, DIVX etc. So no matter in what language or what format you have your content, you can without any problem put SAMI captions on it and windows media player will play the movie alongwith the captions/subtitles, Sounds great eh?

A SAMI document can support captions in six different languages at maximum. However, SAMI's lack of compatability across different platforms and different web browsers may limit the use of several languages at the same time.




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