Captions for Video with Flash CS3

“As you may have gathered, the format is a bit different from what you may be accustomed to when writing an XML document. This is because you need to follow the specification used for captioning set by the World Wide Web Consortium, and the XML document prepared for use with the captioning component must follow that standard.You will notice that you can set the styling for the text, and that each caption needs to have a start and an end point. This means each caption must have a begin attribute, which determines when the caption should appear. If the caption does not have a dur or end attribute, the caption disappears when the next caption appears, or when the FLV file ends. The begin attribute means, “This is where the caption becomes visible.” The dur attribute means, “This is how long the caption remains visible.” Alternatively—and this is really a matter of taste—you can omit dur and replace it with end, which means, “This is where the caption stops being visible.”

In this example, the first caption would appear 25 milliseconds into the start of the video, and remain visible for 3.25 seconds.

Where do you get those timing numbers? You can use the time code in the FLV Encoder to find them, the new Preview parameter in the FLVPlayback component, or you can use the time code displayed in the QuickTime or Windows Media Player interfaces. Another place would be in the video editing software used to create the video in the first place.

Here’s how to hook Timed Text captions to the FLVPlayback component:”

Read the full article on Digital Web Magazine.