Subtitles, Round 2

[Jonathan Larmour]

On 24/09/13 20:50, dinkypumpkin wrote:
> With this patch, subtitles should be formatted as they would be in the
> Flash player on the iPlayer site (incl. explicit line breaks), with one
> exception.  When there is a change of speaker in a subtitle, a leading
> hyphen is prepended to that speaker's dialogue. 

The hyphenated line should surely be on a new line, however with pid b00w5mlg
for example, we have the raw subtitle (all on one line):
<p begin="00:02:18.84" id="p33" end="00:02:22.68">I have stopped wallowing.<br
/>I've told you, I've moved on. <span tts:color="lime">Good.</span></p>

However the .srt file has:
34
00:02:18,840 --> 00:02:22,680
I have stopped wallowing.
I've told you, I've moved on. - Good.

This in other programmes as well, not just that one. Of course you could also
consider using a colour.

Other than that, I haven't seen any problems so far.

> The first (or only)
> speaker in a subtitle does not get a leading hyphen.  The old subtitle
> format is geared to broadcast use and employs colour changes to indicate
> speaker changes.  The diabolical new format doesn't do that as far as I
> can tell, and the iPlayer site's Flash player has always ignored speaker
> changes.  Given that, there is no point in attempting to add colour
> support to get_iplayer subtitles.  The leading hyphen seems like an
> acceptable compromise.

I notice some raw subs have different use of styles on certain lines (e.g. <p
style="s1"... or s2 or whatever), presumably indicating new speakers. However
I think that may be exclusive to the old subs format. And in e.g. pid
b0377tb1, you'd need 4 different colours, and use them consistently, which
seems excessive. Maybe.

Jifl