About Page Videos should be a great experience

[jorbin]

The embeded videos on the about page should be a great expereince for all users. They should accessible and the subtitles should look fantastic. The experience of selecting the subtitles should also be solid.

[dimadin]

Also, don't know about technical limitations, but it would be great if subtitle is turned on for locale that is currently displayed.

For example, if I'm on sr_RS page, I want sr_RS subtitles turned on immediately when I start playing video without need to manually select it.

This would be done by using WPLANG as a parameter.

[jancbeck]

MDN has an overview of ​how captions and subtitles are implemented in HTML5 video. The main takeaways are

1. captions are intended for deaf and hard-of-hearing audiences. The assumed audience for subtitling is hearing people who do not understand the language of dialogue.
2. Either are implemented using the ​<track>-Element. Browser support looks good.
3. [WebVTT ​https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Video_Text_Tracks_Format] is the format to display timed text tracks (e.g. subtitles) in web video. Spec is not finished yet but already usable.

Do we need subtitles or captions or both? What's the audience?
wp_video_shortcode would need a rewrite to support the track element. The track element supports the default attribute so the suggestion of @dimadin is definitely possible.

MediaelementJS ​supports subtitles but only in SRT format. ​Conversion tools are available.

[helen]

I had looked at this when doing the 4.0 video and about page. Ideally, we would use MediaElement and built-in track element/subtitle support, and I think we should have that as the end goal for any further narrated videos we include in core.

For background, here are the issues:

• Due to the use of .tv's established translation workflow, we end up with translation files that are in a different format than MEjs uses (TTML vs. SRT, I believe).
• Without enough time to convert the files and make the subtitle file location(s) available for locales to change/add to, the WordPress.tv player was used.
• The WordPress.tv player requires the use of the Flash player to support subtitles. It also forcibly disables resize after load. Resizing the browser window is realistically an edge case, but it's still quite frustrating.

[SergeyBiryukov]

A couple more issues with the current player:

• Some of the languages are not accessible from the dropdown, because the list is too long and there's no scrollbar: ​https://cloudup.com/cRPOkzK0DPh. A workaround: go into fullscreen mode and select the language, then resume to normal mode.
• The list of languages is randomly sorted on each page load. It's confusing to search for your language in a randomly sorted list and then realize it’s not even there, but it might be there after a page refresh :)

Ideally, we don't have to select the language at all, it should be loaded automatically, as suggested in comment:2.

[obenland]

This is obviously relevant to 4.3 as well.

[obenland]

@jorbin, how would a fix for this ticket look like? When would it be resolved?

[helen]

I think the biggest thing to figure out is how to get subtitles in the right format. Everything else is small enough.

[netweb]

Just to add a note that Firefox has blocked the Flash plugin ​https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/blocked/p946

Many recommendations this past week have been to update Flash if you require it, if you don't require it uninstall it.

I'm not sure if the plan for 4.3 is to use WordPress.TV or HTML5, the sooner it's HTML5 the better ;)

Edit: The new and improved VideoPress? Can that do subtitles?

[obenland]

Replying to netweb:

Edit: The new and improved VideoPress? Can that do subtitles?

Yes, it will. They currently working on it to get them ready for us before RC.

[netweb]

Replying to obenland:

Replying to netweb:

Edit: The new and improved VideoPress? Can that do subtitles?

Yes, it will. They currently working on it to get them ready for us before RC.

Excellent, give us a shoutout in #polyglots on Slack if anyone doing this needs anything

[helen]

I don't like to operate on the assumption that external work will get done on our timeline. Even assuming that subtitles will get done in time, does that include being able to specify which is loaded for localized versions?

It looks like there are ways to convert from TTML (WordPress.tv's format) to SRT (more typical format, usable by MediaElement). I think we should test a couple methods and choose one as a backup option - the video should be on WordPress.tv anyway, so we could upload there, caption, and then convert captions and host those on a .org CDN - could probably get away with serving the video files directly from wherever they're stored for VideoPress/.com.

[obenland]

Closing this ticket with a plan of attack:

We'll be using the new VideoPress if it has Subtitle support by August 12. If that doesn't work for us we'll use Mediaelement.js for. Subtitle translations continue to happen on wordpress.tv.

Anything else related to the About page for 4.3 can be discussed in #32929.