Wanted to do a quick mention of the updated mwEmbed gadget and subtitles
support on the email list(s) in case people have missed its mention on
the village pump [1] or other venues.
* On commons the "Commons:Timed_Text" and "Template:Closed_cap" have
been started.
* oggHandler has been patched to support "itext" [2], [3] output so that
it would not need to hit the api to get the list of available subtitles
when we are embedding locally. Remote embedding outside of wikimedia
domain grabs the up-to-date list of available tracks via an api call.
* A basic "Add timed text" interface is accessible from the "cc"
button
letting you "upload" an srt file.
* If you enable the mwEmbed gadget on English wikipedia ( or other
wikipedias ) it will display commons subtitles in the respective
wgUserLanguage. ( Interface translations are temporarly dissabled per
bug 21947 which should be "resolvable" as soon as the release is branched.
* Even with extremely limited exposure the number of subtitle files is
starting to grow: [4]
* The timedText display supports inline "wiki-text" so persons names,
subjects and place of interest can be linked to their respective
wikpedia articles in their respective languages from the srt text. [5]
* Gadget feedback has been very good. Big thanks to all that have helped
test and especially User:84user with his very detailed reports ;)
And finally .. I imagine it ~may~ take some time before the mwEmbed
stuff makes its way through code review and on by default deployment
because of release branching and mwEmbed includes quite a few other
components ... But similar to usability beta, and other gadgets we could
let people do a much easier opt in. Which I will continue to look into
in the mean time.
peace,
michael
[1]
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump#Improved_Close_Capti…
[2]
http://www.annodex.net/~silvia/itext/
[3]
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/60458
[4]
http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3AAllPages&from=…
[5]
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Yochai_Benkler_-_On_Autonomy,_Contro…
**