Abstract
Ambient Intelligence is a new paradigm in which environments are sensitive and responsive to the presence of people. This is having an increasing importance in multimedia applications, which frequently rely on sensors to provide useful information to the user. In this context, multimedia applications must adapt and personalize both content and interfaces in order to reach acceptable levels of context-specific quality of service for the user, and enable the content to be available anywhere and at any time. The next step is to make content available to everybody in order to overcome the existing access barriers to content for users with specific needs, or else to adapt to different platforms, hence making content fully usable and accessible. Appropriate access to video content, for instance, is not always possible due to the technical limitations of traditional video packaging, transmission and presentation. This restricts the flexibility of subtitles and audio-descriptions to be adapted to different devices, contexts and users. New Web standards built around HTML5 enable more featured applications with better adaptation and personalization facilities, and thus would seem more suitable for accessible AmI environments. This work presents a video subtitling system that enables the customization, adaptation and synchronization of subtitles across different devices and multiple screens. The benefits of HTML5 applications for building the solution are analyzed along with their current platform support. Moreover, examples of the use of the application in three different cases are presented. Finally, the user experience of the solution is evaluated.
Highlights
Multimedia applications are a key factor in Ambient Intelligence (AmI) environments in which products and services are responsive to the user context, offering a rich variety of applications in the professional and consumer domains
Inspired by Danilo’s approach for synchronizing Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) subtitles through SMIL, this paper proposes a comprehensive solution for HTML5 video subtitling across multiple screens and devices
This management may enable the dynamic adaptation of the subtitle text color, the automatic change of language according to the browser-defined language, or the splitting of both sources for the separate presentation of one or both of them on a second screen
Summary
Multimedia applications are a key factor in Ambient Intelligence (AmI) environments in which products and services are responsive to the user context, offering a rich variety of applications in the professional and consumer domains. In order to demonstrate the viability and support for the proposed solution, three instances for the use of the application for video subtitling have been created: (1) a web widget to extend the functionality of an HTML5 video component, enabling user modifications to the language and format of the subtitles; (2) an add-on for smart TV platforms that improves subtitle readability when the user interface combines video with other interactive content; and (3) a mobile application to enable multi-screen capabilities within a home environment (as an example of an AmI environment) to receive TV subtitles on the mobile device regardless of the native runtime of the device. This section compares the two, and justifies our choice for building the presented subtitling system for AmI environments, taking advantage of HTML5 capabilities
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