Lots of broadcasters format their captions in Roll Up format (as opposed to Pop On), especially for live television. Live news shows and sports events are Roll Up. Live captioning can only be formatted as roll up.
Roll up works fine for live TV, but does not display correctly when converted to a web-compatible format for video played on JW Player 7 0 1 (and earlier?).
JW Player 7 0 1 (and earlier?) does not support display of Roll Up captions. JW Player only displays 1 line of captions at a time.
When roll up captions are made, the captioner counts on the fact that the caption lines will be displayed on screen for the length of time it takes to roll up 1 or 2 more captions. While the time that the caption line is initially displayed may not give the viewer enough time to read the whole line, the expectation is that the viewer will have time to read the caption as it is displayed once or twice more, moved up a line or two, before that caption is cleared from the screen.
When a roll up caption file is converted to a web caption file, JW Player displays the former roll up captions as a 1-line pop on caption. JW Player only displays one caption line (of up to 32 characters) at a time.
Some lines are not displayed long enough to read. They are there and then gone in a flash. The viewer doesn’t get a second or third chance to finish reading that caption while it rolls up to the next vertical caption line.
In addition to some roll up captions not being displayed long enough to read, other roll up captions are displayed much longer than necessary.
To avoid scrimping on the caption reading time available to viewers, we have been re-formatting some of our captions as 2-line pop-on. Because of this JW Player display issue, we try to avoid roll up captions for content that is produced ahead of time (i.e. not aired live.)
How do you handle playing your roll up captions on web video players?
Yours verbatim,
Caption Breaker
“Captions: so hard to make; so easy to break.”
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