Using a web CMS to manage subtitled video
There are a number of FLOSS web Content Management Systems (CMS) that offer specialised video functionality - such as Plumi http://plumi.org/ and various video specific Drupal modules.
Some of the interesting functionality these web applications bring to online video distribution include:
- automatic video transcoding to various formats and sizes to match the different playback devices
- workflows for community review and moderation
- classification systems
- syndication technologies such as RSS2
- web preview capabilities through flash video plugins or native playback.
We can not give examples of FLOSS web CMSs that do video hosting and have integrated subtitle production, translation and playback functionality as these systems has not been sufficiently developed.
Critical Commons (http://criticalcommons.org/) is one example of a FLOSS video annotation service, based on the Plumi CMS, that allows uploading of audio commentary per video, which is then integrated into video playback via the open source JW Player (http://www.longtailvideo.com/players/jw-flv-player/). That is, you can choose to listen to the video's original audio track, the commentary or both. It also allows uploading of text commentaries on individual videos, however it has not developed into system for subtitling or captioning of the videos using these text commentaries yet.
The Plumi video CMS allows the functionality as mentioned above, however no subtitling production or playback is possible out-of-the-box.
It is possible to use the combination of Plumi, the new HTML5 video tag, and Javascript to build FLOSS web applications to allow "peer produced" subtitling production, translation and playback. This technology is expected to evolve rapidly through 2009.
Kultura has a released an alpha version of its community edition of its video hosting software at http://www.kaltura.org/project/kalturaCE (28th June 2009). Their commercial service has integration with a commercial proprietary service for translation and subtitling video (http://corp.kaltura.com/technology/editing_and_annotation). The video subtitling functionality is produced by a third-party software company who have developed a plugin for the open source Flash video player, JW Player.