
Introducing Opened Captions - ari_elle
http://slifty.com/2012/10/introducing-opened-captions/
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bgruber
a) this is awesome.

b) might want to rethink the name. there is a reason closed captions are
called closed, and it's to differentiate them from, well, open captions. if
this project becomes a big success (and i really, really hope it does) i'd
hate to see an increase in confusion for the accessibility community, which
has enough trouble getting people to be aware of the different technologies.
Go ask an employee at a movie theater showing open captions about open
captions. they won't know what you're talking about.

~~~
slifty
Thanks for the feedback!

I did do a quick look into it up front and my gut feeling was that since
"opened" and "open" were different it might be OK. I liked the meaning of
"Opened Captions." Still a very valid point, and that concern won't go away
any time soon. Happy to consider suggestions, and will stew on it more myself
as well.

~~~
jpdoctor
Another vote for: You really need a different name. Open is taken; a small
token variation on that word will mislead folks.

How about "streamed captions"?

Also: The rebroadcasting copyrights have to be fraught with issues. Any
comments on that?

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slifty
Fiiiiiiiiinnnneeeeeeeeeeeee. X(

As for the CC issues, I'm starting with C-SPAN simply because there is a lot
more precedent for legal non-commercial fair use. Using this for other
situations is another question. Based on a cursory exploration it seems that
there is a strong argument for programmatically accesible syndication being
legal in most cases. This means that it is probably fine to use the stream to
made a visualization / application that doesn't actually render the transcript
to a user, but is simply based on it.

Also, any application that renders the captions but is dedicated to
accessibility seems like it may be protected by the law.

Long story short, I'll need to look into it; for now I'm banking on the
service as it stands being fair use, which I legitimately believe it is.

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slifty
Just wanted to give a shoutout to the first dirty hack using OpenedCaptions:
DRUNK-SAPN

It is a C-SPAN transcript that gets increasingly drunk.
<http://openedcaptions.com/drunk-sapn/>

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JMill
It's great to see content delivered in an alternative format to engage a
different segment of watchers/listeners/readers. Has C-SPAN always provided
live transcripts? In layman's terms, how is the data pulled from C-SPAN?

Edit: I misread your post. The Opened Captions servers pull CC data in via
serial port. Thanks for providing a bridge to this live data.

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JonLim
Funny, I was contemplating something similar for the Canadian version.

May I ask where you got the source for the transcripts of C-SPAN from?

~~~
slifty
For now we're cheating and using a thing called TextGrabber (we were in a rush
for the debates and couldn't play with more direct software solutions, but
those absolutely exist). The box costs about $300 ::
<http://www.textgrabber.com/>

If you wait I'm sure I or someone will add the ability to use a video stream
as a source; there are tools out there that pull Closed Captions from video
files and streams. For instance <http://ccextractor.sourceforge.net/>

Heck, maybe you want to add that feature :)

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lightyrs
Thank you. This is a really cool project!

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zapt02
This is neat!

