An efficient, streamable text format for multimedia captions and subtitles

In spite of the high profile of media types such as video, audio and images, many multimedia presentations rely extensively on text content. Text can be used for incidental labels, or as subtitles or captions that accompany other media objects. In a multimedia document, text content is not only constrained by the need to support presentation styles and layout, it is also constrained by the temporal context of the presentation. This involves intra-text and extra-text timing synchronization with other media objects. This paper describes a new timed-text representation language that is intended to be embedded in a non-text host language. Our format, which we call aText (for the Ambulant Text Format), balances the need for text styling with the requirement for an efficient representation that can be easily parsed and scheduled at runtime. aText, which can also be streamed, is defined as an embeddable text format for use within declarative XML languages. The paper presents a discussion of ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: DOCENG
• Authors: Dick C. A. Bulterman, A. J. Jansen, Pablo César, Samuel Cruz-Lara
• Keywords: Ambulant Text Format, DOCENG 2007, Document Analysis, Text Content, Text Formats