Movie text tracks

[Devin Asay]

Sorry, I left out the punch line.

My original need was simply to extract the text tracks from the old .mov files. It turns out you can do that, after a fashion, with QT Pro, but it comes out with lots of binary cruft. I found out you can also do this with ffmpeg, the Swiss Army Knife of video tools. This website explains how:

https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/403944-Extract-and-convert-QuickTime-7-Pro-TextTracks

Neither method was perfect, but both were good enough for what I wanted.

- Devin

On May 18, 2022, at 2:36 PM, Devin Asay via use-livecode <use-livecode at lists.runrev.com<mailto:use-livecode at lists.runrev.com>> wrote:

Hi all,

Thanks for the advice. I wanted to follow up with what I eventually ended up doing.

So, both Jacque’s and Richmond’s suggestions were good, but too much work for just peeking at some text tracks. But they got me thinking: Hey, Windows 10 actually still runs QT 7, and I have an old QT Pro license key for Windows. I wonder if it still works. (Spoiler alert—it does!) So I was at least able to open up the movie files. Score 1 for Microsoft and backward compatibility! And there, magically, were my text tracks!

Paul, I think your suggestion to encourage LiveCode to support text track access that exists in the modern AV frameworks is a great one. Maybe timely, now that the mothership has asked for top 10 bug fix requests again.

Richard, thanks for pointing me in the direction of HTML 5. It set me on a little journey to educate myself on the state of video captioning in *this* century! Definitely glad I took that little detour and learned about WebVTT captioning format.

Thanks again for the help and suggestions. This community never disappoints!

- Devin

On May 17, 2022, at 2:16 PM, J. Landman Gay via use-livecode <use-livecode at lists.runrev.com<mailto:use-livecode at lists.runrev.com><mailto:use-livecode at lists.runrev.com>> wrote:

Or you could use an OS 9 emulator like SheepShaver where the old version of QT is available.
<https://sheepshaver.cebix.net/>


On 5/17/22 1:02 PM, Richmond via use-livecode wrote:
Here's a thought:
Dig out an old mac that runs, say, MacOS 10.6 or 10.7 and then follow this:
https://synchrimedia.blogspot.com/2016/02/extracting-qt-text-tracks-from-movies.html
--
Jacqueline Landman Gay         |     jacque at hyperactivesw.com<mailto:jacque at hyperactivesw.com>
HyperActive Software           |     http://www.hyperactivesw.com

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Devin Asay
Office of Digital Humanities
Brigham Young University

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Devin Asay
Office of Digital Humanities
Brigham Young University