Subtitle Synchronization across Multiple Screens and Devices

Abstract

Ambient Intelligence is a new paradigm in which environments are sensitive and responsive to the presence of people. This is having an increasing importance in multimedia applications, which frequently rely on sensors to provide useful information to the user. In this context, multimedia applications must adapt and personalize both content and interfaces in order to reach acceptable levels of context-specific quality of service for the user, and enable the content to be available anywhere and at any time. The next step is to make content available to everybody in order to overcome the existing access barriers to content for users with specific needs, or else to adapt to different platforms, hence making content fully usable and accessible. Appropriate access to video content, for instance, is not always possible due to the technical limitations of traditional video packaging, transmission and presentation. This restricts the flexibility of subtitles and audio-descriptions to be adapted to different devices, contexts and users. New Web standards built around HTML5 enable more featured applications with better adaptation and personalization facilities, and thus would seem more suitable for accessible AmI environments. This work presents a video subtitling system that enables the customization, adaptation and synchronization of subtitles across different devices and multiple screens. The benefits of HTML5 applications for building the solution are analyzed along with their current platform support. Moreover, examples of the use of the application in three different cases are presented. Finally, the user experience of the solution is evaluated.

Culture 4 all: accessibility-enabled cultural experiences through immersive VR360 content

“…Up to date, many subtitling solutions for traditional 2D video content have been proposed, even including support for personalization options (e.g., [30], [31], [32]) and advanced presentation methods for better speaker identification (e.g., [33]). However, subtitling solutions for immersive media are still in their infancy.…”

Sub-Sync: Automatic Synchronization of Subtitles in the Broadcasting of True Live programs in Spanish

“…Reference [27] presents an interactive system for automatically generating video summaries and performing subtitles synchronization for persons with hearing loss using Natural Language Processing (NLP). In [28] a video subtitling system that enables the customization, adaptation and synchronization of subtitles across different devices and multiple screens is used, allowing access to these contents to more people anywhere.…”

Cross-device media: a review of second screening and multi-device television

“…Finally, there is latency -the extent to which content temporally synchronises across devices is vitally important for both for collocated devices [33] and remote shared viewing [34]. For instance, high synchrony is essentially for subtitles [71] and directors commentaries [43]. We now discuss these three factors in the context of existing technologies to provide cross-device media and remark on its potential future.…”