At the Ubuntu Screencast Team we have made a few screencasts in English.
We’ve been approached by people whose first language is not English with a view to translating these videos. With little thought I suggested that someone send me a .srt caption/subtitle file and/or an audio file for their native language.
The .srt file we can deal with fine. People can either download it and put it in the same folder as the video “et voila” they get subtitles in their video player of choice (tested here in Totem). The flash player we use on the site also supports .srt files, as does Google Video (allegedly). So that’s all well and good.
The potential problem is the audio files. We currently host each video in numerous formats (OGG and FLV, and for some, AVI), and each one in at least 3 resolutions. That makes between 6 and 9 video files which can range from 100 to 200 MB in size (in total) depending on their length, resolution and encoding.
I could just dub the (in this case) French audio over the top of the English on my master MPEG2 video and then re-encode the 6-9 different versions. This would be a little time consuming (in terms of CPU grunt to do the encoding) but it’s not that big a deal, I can walk away and leave it running.
There is also the time taken to upload all that new video to the site, again time consuming but also something I can walk away from. My upstream bandwidth is 700Kb/s so I get around 80KB/s upload.
Then there is the additional disk space to hold all of this.
I guess I could upload the master video to my own personal virtual host (in a data centre in London), and install the necessary tools (ffmpeg etc) on there to do the encoding server-side, then it would be very quick to get the resultant files from my virtual server to the Canonical hosting where the screencast site is held.
Is there another way to manage this?
Of course I could choose to make less formats/resolutions available in the non-English language – perhaps make them _only_ available in Ogg format. But this seems a bit rude to me to people for whom English is not their first language.
Suggestions welcome.
Multi-lingual Video and Audio
At the Ubuntu Screencast Team we have made a few screencasts in English.
We’ve been approached by people whose first language is not English with a view to translating these videos. With little thought I suggested that someone send me a .srt caption/subtitle file and/or an audio file for their native language.
The .srt file we can deal with fine. People can either download it and put it in the same folder as the video “et voila” they get subtitles in their video player of choice (tested here in Totem). The flash player we use on the site also supports .srt files, as does Google Video (allegedly). So that’s all well and good.
The potential problem is the audio files. We currently host each video in numerous formats (OGG and FLV, and for some, AVI), and each one in at least 3 resolutions. That makes between 6 and 9 video files which can range from 100 to 200 MB in size (in total) depending on their length, resolution and encoding.
I could just dub the (in this case) French audio over the top of the English on my master MPEG2 video and then re-encode the 6-9 different versions. This would be a little time consuming (in terms of CPU grunt to do the encoding) but it’s not that big a deal, I can walk away and leave it running.
There is also the time taken to upload all that new video to the site, again time consuming but also something I can walk away from. My upstream bandwidth is 700Kb/s so I get around 80KB/s upload.
Then there is the additional disk space to hold all of this.
I guess I could upload the master video to my own personal virtual host (in a data centre in London), and install the necessary tools (ffmpeg etc) on there to do the encoding server-side, then it would be very quick to get the resultant files from my virtual server to the Canonical hosting where the screencast site is held.
Is there another way to manage this?
Of course I could choose to make less formats/resolutions available in the non-English language – perhaps make them _only_ available in Ogg format. But this seems a bit rude to me to people for whom English is not their first language.
Suggestions welcome.