No support for video subtitles track?

This forum is for all Flare issues not related to any of the other categories.
Post Reply
amflores
Jr. Propeller Head
Posts: 2
Joined: Mon Oct 09, 2017 1:29 pm

No support for video subtitles track?

Post by amflores »

In order for our online Help to be accessible, we need to add a subtitles track to the videos. I don't see any way to do this with MadCap Flare. If I insert an HTML5 video, Flare uses the <object> tags and then later converts that to <video> when I generate and publish my output. If I try to add <video> tags directly, I get the unsupported syntax message that other forum users have commented on. Manually editing each of the exported pages isn't really feasible--we have 100+ videos. Is there any way to add subtitles for a video via Flare?
maggieedd
Jr. Propeller Head
Posts: 2
Joined: Thu Apr 30, 2020 10:31 am

Re: No support for video subtitles track?

Post by maggieedd »

Although this post is a few years old, I can't find any other reference to this issue. I'm having the same trouble with providing subtitles in a video in flare.
Have there been updates to make this possible since this post?
rosalindnelson
Jr. Propeller Head
Posts: 2
Joined: Fri Dec 13, 2019 10:26 am

Re: No support for video subtitles track?

Post by rosalindnelson »

I am also struggling with this. I need to incorporate some .mp4 files from Training. They can give me a .vtt file with the captions/subtitles. I was able to create <video> elements instead of <object> to embed a video. I was able to get Flare to accept the syntax and embed the video. However, there were no captions in the video. Anyone have thoughts on this?
kmorrison
Sr. Propeller Head
Posts: 104
Joined: Mon Nov 11, 2013 3:04 pm
Location: Ottawa, Canada
Contact:

Re: No support for video subtitles track?

Post by kmorrison »

What we do is host the videos elsewhere and then embed them in Flare content. The video hosting site we use (Vidyard) is nicely set up for subtitling videos. It even has some pretty decent automated voice recognition that does a first pass at subtitles for you. Vidyard isn't free, but if that's an issue, I wonder if YouTube might meet your needs.

Warning about placing videos directly in your Flare content instead of hosting elsewhere: don't make the rookie mistake I did of assuming that the videos will play as smoothly for users as they do for you when viewing the output on your local machine. If the server that is serving up the content isn't equipped to handle streaming, the videos will load painfully slowly for users. It might be fine, but it might not, so it's a good idea to check.
NorthEast
Master Propellus Maximus
Posts: 6359
Joined: Mon Mar 05, 2007 8:33 am

Re: No support for video subtitles track?

Post by NorthEast »

You can insert captions for videos using the <video> tag.

However, you may have problems if you're viewing this locally on your PC and not on a server.
When I view the output locally on my PC, Chrome will display an error in the Console (F12) because it considers the VTT file is unsafe to load from a local file:// location.
When I publish to a server and test it from there, the caption file will load and work fine.

Here's the code that I use:

Code: Select all

        <video id="video1" controls="">
            <source type="video/mp4" src="something.mp4" />
            <track kind="captions" src="something.vtt" srclang="en" label="English captions" />
        </video>
Post Reply