Video streaming woes

Question

Hey everyone!

I'm working on a video streaming application, where compatibility has so far been limited to Windows and IE (though it seems to work well enough on Firefox as well)

I have been tasked to get it to work on Macs, and in the future Unix as well, but I figure that if I get Macs to work, UNIX will follow.

We're using a Windows Media Streaming Server, with an .asx playlist file containing the streaming media. The URLs may also contain a subtitle file, and it goes a little somethin' like this:

mms://192.168.xx.xxx/video/movie99.wmv?SAMI=http://192.168.xx.yyy/subs/movie99.smi

Now, I'm pretty lost when it comes to Mac OSX, but I managed to get the video working with Flip4Mac, which seems to be some kind of "Microsoft Kit" for Quicktime. I also got it to work with a VLC plugin in Firefox and Safari. However, I can't for the life of me get the subtitles to work.

I'm willing to hear whatever solutions you can think of. Javascript magic? Install something on the mac? Use java web start to launch an app that runs a commandline argument starting vlc with the subtitle file? Hit me :)

The only solution I don't want to hear is "Make a youtube" and stuff like that. Simple solutions where we don't have to rewrite all of our core functionality is appreciated :)

Regards, Ace

Answer 1

Well, probably this is not the kind of answer you were expecting, but since in 2 days you didn't get anything, here are my 0.02$.

Forget IE, use Firefox + theora and everything automagically will work. Probably you will need to rewrite at least part of your core server-side functionality, though. See here for details.

Answer 2

Are you asking which media players support SAMI?

You really could grab the text of the file and parse it in javascript, if you like that kinda thing. BTW thank you very much for getting closed captions working w/ whatever media project you're doing!!

Would it be too much to ask to try SMIL instead?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAMI#Media_Players_that_Support_SAMI

Answer 3

Unfortunately, outside of Windows Media Player, streaming subtitles is definitely not easy:

http://wiki.videolan.org/Subtitles even says so.

If you have the source video available to you, I think your best bet would be to have alternative media served to platforms other than Windows/IE.

You could code Javascript for the browser detection and then request to proper URL (i.e. Streaming Media/Subtitles for Windows, Streaming Media or Streaming Media with embedded subtitles if subtitles are requested).

I did a quick search for embedding subtitles and netted this post. It has some links to tools used to embed subtitles in your media:

http://mwolk.com/blog/how-to-embed-subtitles-into-videos/

Good luck!

Answer 4

It might not be the road you want to take, but if you want ensure that subtitles are shown regardless of platform you incorporate them directly into the video and distribute it in an OS agnostic form (QuickTime or Flash). By having the sub-titles embedded within the video streaming and platform are irrelevant.