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Editing Multilingual Video Captions Using a CCK Field in Drupal
Improving the Workflow and Usability of Multilingual Video Subtitles
Improving the Workflow and Usability of Multilingual Video Subtitles
Last week I posted about adding multilingual subtitles to video content using JW FLV Media Player and Drupal. The workflow I described involves attaching a W3C Timed-Text XML file to a node using an upload form. It’s great for initial translations because you can take advantage of a desktop captioning tool, but what happens when you need to make small changes or corrections? We decided that requiring the user to download the file, edit it, and re-upload it was a major usability issue.
My solution is to parse the contents of the Timed-Text file into a CCK field so it can be manipulated directly on the node editing form. The uploaded file is parsed and the CCK field is populated right before your eyes using an AJAX callback, and the interface allows users to add additional lines of captions dynamically thanks to some logic borrowed from the Link module. Once the node is saved, the CCK field can be used with a custom views style plugin to display a fully formatted Timed-Text XML file.
You can watch what I did in this screencast:
Comments
I am also very interested in
I am also very interested in this (either as a module or other type of help) feature. I know too little to develop this by myself but this seems a valuable contribution. Oh and screen cast is a no-go here too.
More admin area customizations
This screencast and the one on the Context UI keep teasing me with your admin theme and node creation tweaks. It looks like there are a number of Wordpress-like changes being made that I'm really liking. Please do share more about this!
Missing Screencast
Want to watch the screencast but the popup only shows a black screen.
Please fix this problem! :)
Hi CKIDOW, Thanks for
Hi CKIDOW,
Thanks for checking about this. Try watching the video again now. The pop up box will show up black but will have an arrow - just press that and the screencast should start.
Bonnie
Theming node forms
Hey Rick,
You're probably referring to a tiny little dsadmin module we have running (provides an admin menu at the top of pages). There are several very nice modules that do this sort of thing:
http://drupal.org/project/admin_menu for example.
As for the node form, you can push form elements into a "sidebar" div by creating a theme override for theme_node_form. Nick Lewis has a great tutorial on this here:
http://www.nicklewis.org/node/764
Very cool
This looks really excellent. Is this module downloadable anyway? (btw, playing the video crashes firefox at the moment).
Module Release
Hey Patrick,
We're hoping to release this as a module on Drupal.org at some point. For now, we're still trying to clean everything up. The module will probably integrate with the flvmediaplayer module and the rest of the the media_mover suite.
We were having some problems with the screencast earlier, but we've made some changes. Give it another shot :)
Screencast link seems broken or wrong
This is a very interresting subject, but for now the screencast seems unavailable. I hope this is an easy issue to fix ;) Looking forward to this. Thanks.
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