A short tour of subtitling technology
14 août 2013
At IBC 2013, the EBU technical group on subtitling is organizing a series of visits to subtitling equipment vendors. Broadcaster representatives are welcome to join the tour. Simply drop an e-mail to: [email protected] to receive the schedule. The visits are designed to learn about the state of the art in subtitling equipment and to sync with manufacturers on current standardization efforts.
Last month, the EBU published EBU-TT part 2 (Tech 3360) v0.9, which explains how EBU STL subtitle files can be mapped to the new EBU-TT subtitling format. This specification is highly relevant for broadcasters producing prepared subtitling. EBU Tech 3360 is open for industry comments until 31 August 2013.
Online Distribution
With the format for the production of prepared subtitles largely finished, the main focus has now shifted to supporting online distribution of subtitling, e.g. for use in MPEG-DASH and hybrid television platforms.
The EBU aims for maximum harmonization with other initiatives (see the figure above), to prevent duplication of work and to improve interoperability. The goal is to publish a minimal profile of EBU-TT for distribution (EBU-TT-D) later this year.
At the same time work is continuing to address the needs for a standardized solution for the production of live subtitling. During recent meeting at the IRT in Munich, key topics such as segmentation, synchronization and complexity limitation were addressed in detail.
Image: Many subtitle formats have been introduced recently; fortunately much of their functionality revolves around a common overlapping subset.