The other day, my captions got broke in a new and interesting way. No run-of-the-mill known-issues for me. No, my captions had strange, rare symptoms that got no hits in a web search.
Let’s pretend for a moment that we are caption doctors, and have been presented with captions that have a collection of odd symptoms. Let’s make a differential diagnosis.
Oh, man, do I miss having new episodes of House, M.D. to watch!
CLINICAL PROBLEM-SOLVING
Neonate 2-line Pop On TT.xml captions ages birth – 30 days developed an impairment where only 1 of the 2 caption lines would display in a well-established web player. Either Pop1 1 OR Pop2 would display at the timecode specified, but not both. Most of the time, Pop1 was skipped from display while Pop2 displayed correctly. Occasionally, Pop1 displayed correctly, but Pop2 was skipped.Captioner began by examining xml caption file body for anomalies.
DIFFERENTIAL DIAGNOSIS
*** Spoiler Alert: The clinical symptoms were caused by a media player version upgrade which was missing previously installed custom code to tell the media player to ignore all positioning information within captions. Since the new version of the media player is not able to process positioning information and does not have the custom code fix telling it to suppress positioning information, the new player version read the positioning information and then freaked out when displaying the captions on the web.
Yours verbatim,
Caption Breaker
“Captions: so hard to make; so easy to break.”
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