2008/6/4 Etienne Pollard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > On Wed, Jun 4, 2008 at 10:55 AM, Brian Butterworth > <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > I thought they were trying to do OCR on the captions from the DVB-T > stream. > > > > What I was saying was that the old Freeview version of BBC Parliament > used > > to have a quarter-screen picture and the information that is now in the > > Astons was provided using MHEG5. This was clear text (to keep the > bandwidth > > down) not bitmap graphics. > > Forgive my ignorance, but what is an Aston?
Sorry, it's a genericized trademark for "captions" overlaid on TV output.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aston_Broadcast_Systems > > > OCRing is never going to be brilliant, given the semi-transparent nature > of > > the captions on BBC Parliament. > > > > However, a clear text feed of the data would keep the data pure, surely? > > The machines that put the captions up on the screen have internal > text-based logs, to which we have access. However, since this is > basically just pulling logfiles off a set of operational machines this > access isn't 100% reliable. The MHEG5 service was 100% reliable, I would conjecture that it is possible to get them reliably. > The data in the log files is of variable > quality, since there are some speeches that are not captioned, and > other times captions aren't actually speeches (e.g. reaction shot of > previous speaker during a long speech can prompt a back and forth of > captions, even though the same person is speaking throughout the > changeover in captions). So although we use the logfiles to get an > approximate fix, we had to resort to the timestamping game for > accuracy. IMHO this is a just a clear case of GIGO. The best thing is whoever is operating the captions for BBC Parliament to be provided with the ability to correctly tag the content in the first place. The taxpayer (not Licence Fee payer) is paying for this to be done already, it seems just crazy that they can't do it, ahem, properly. I'm not attacking the idea of the workaround, I'm just saying that it would be best for the data to be prepared correctly at source and then distributed. > > > Hope that helps, > > -- etienne > - > Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please > visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. > Unofficial list archive: > http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/ > -- Brian Butterworth http://www.ukfree.tv - independent digital television and switchover advice, since 2002
