Forum user: mikebrant

I should clarify my setup.

I have a single flowplayer instance, which has within its canvas both the screen where the video plays and a area created with the content plug-in where I am putting text commentary populated via the caption plug-in.

The video to be played is selected from an external playlist which utilizes the javascript playlist plug-in. When a video is selected from the playlist, an onStart event fires which loads the appropriate timed text file into the player to present the commentary along with the video.

I am not really using the captions for the purpose of captioning the voice track of the video. Rather I was intending it to show commentary related to the video. As such, the commentary will not be refreshing as often as caption of the voice track would. So, in order to present the information clearly, I would like to be able to use line breaks/paragraphs as well as different text formatting within a single caption.

It seems that using the captions plug-in, however, that I am limited to only providing a single style for any given caption (i.e. each 'p' node in the timed text file can only have one defined style). I would be happy just to be able to insert line breaks if this is possible, so that at least I could format the commentary into paragraphs, but I have not found out how to create a line break.

I would consider using cuepoints, at which I would update the content container, however I don't think the API supports all the functionality I would need to do this. I can't add cuepoints in the flowplayer configuration, as the cuepoints will vary for each video. So I would need to programmatically add cuepoints when loading each video. This would be some work to achieve but is feasible, however, I do not believe there is a way to actually remove cuepoints once they had been added. This would prevent me from being able to use such an approach.

I believe that is just the source actionscript file associated with the flowplayer caption plug-in. I had actually pulled down the source and glanced through it yesterday to see if I could gain any additional insight as to how the caption plug-in actually works.

Thanks for your help.

The problem you describe sounds exactly like what I was experiencing until I changed out my caption swf. Your code looks correct to me, though I am relatively new to the flowplayer as well.

I have experienced problems with timed text files when using what should be properly formed XML per the W3C specs. It seems the timed text parser doesn't exactly comply to the spec. But even when I had these issues, this didn't prevent the player itself from loading.

The only thing that fixed the problem I had was changing out the captions swf. Sorry this didn't work for you.

I have been playing around with the captions plugin for use with timed text files, and have been running into what seem to be limitations in regards to text formatting.

I was hoping to be able to use different font styles within a single caption p element via use of span tags (an allowable XML node type per W3C). Unfortunately, it seems as if the XML parser will not handle these tags, as when added, the text within the span node fails to display.

Similarly, I was hoping to be able to add line breaks using a br node (another allowable node type per W3C), however the line breaks are not rendered.

My main goal here is to be able to display some text content in a content plugin that will display alongside my video and be able to be automatically changed as the video is played. I should also note that my flowplayer instance works in conjunction with a playlist, so it is not really feasible to use onCuePoint configuration with just the content plugin, as the cuepoints and text content will vary between videos.

I am wondering if I am attempting to do this improperly or whether the parser being used simply does not handle all allowable element types as specified in W3C for timed text.

I have not yet investigated working with Subrip files, but would certainly be willing to so if they allow better formatting options.

Any other advice on how this might be achieved would be welcome.

I messed around with this for the better part of a day, until I finally download the plugin again. Originally I had just downloaded the swf file only, which for some reason seems like it may be corrupt on this site. It was only 385 bytes in size.

I finally downloaded the zip file, and noticed that the swf for the plugin here was like 8KB. Once I uploaded this to the server, everything magically worked.