In a past blog, I discussed some work I’ve had with the GPAC’s TTXT subtitle standard. I’ve begun working on Popcorn.js and after not too much work, Popcorn is beginning to gain TTXT support. While this would’ve been much more work before the 0.2 re-engineering, plugins are now supported and it’s as simple as registering a parser function for a specific file extension.
What does this mean?
For developers, it’s easy to add onto popcorn. Their page covers just about everything you could need to know, and once you learn the intuitive API it’s all systems go. For this initial TTXT support it was as simple as using the existing subtitle plugin and writing a custom parser to convert a TTXT file into subtitle objects. Probably about 40 executable lines of code needed in all.
For Popcorn.js users, I can see this being quite advantageous as well. With the ease of adding functionality, new features are able to be developed quickly and with minimal impact on what’s already in use by Popcorn.js. This means the web pages using Popcorn can only get more dynamic as time goes on.
Back to TTXT: It is a robust standard. I’ve studied the spec and am beginning to learn it all, but thus far only the text information from a file is processed; not the styling information One of the benefits of TTXT is it’s rich support for styles down to a per-subtitle, per-character level. This means one subtitle can be half 12pt Arial font, half 36pt Courier. Another subtitle could be all Verdana and in red, except for a desired letter to be blue. This styling information is what I’m least familiar with about the standard.
My friend Anna has already put the call out if anyone has some more complicated TTXT files to contribute to be studied and run by our parser. I’d like to re-issue the call here, and would be interested in hearing from any developers or film makers who have more familiarity with this standard.
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