Yesterday I learned how to add closed captioning to online videos. This would only be useful if you hosted a video yourself because most video sharing sites don’t support closed captions. To add closed captions to Flash videos you just need to create a Timed Text XML file. Apparently you can’t just use any old file because it is based on the video keyframes. However I did find a Flash based tool for adding captions known as Subtitle Horse. The XML file is created by a PHP script so you also need a web server capable of running PHP. Fortunately PHP programming is one of the tech skills I am mastering.
I also came across some really cool technology which is undoubtedly the future of video. On the http://www.immersivemedia.com/ web site you can try out 360° video. It is sort of like Google Street Views only with video instead of photos. You can look in any direction and see video running in a 360° panoramic view. It is just like being there! Now that I’ve seen the concept demonstrated I’m sure this is how video is going to be in our high tech future. It may spell the doom of television sets because 360° video definitely requires a computer to process the 360° panoramic view. It will also require faster computers because my system could barely handle the processing involved in following my movements.
Today I created an ASP.NET page to automate the Microsoft Source Code Analyzer for SQL Injection command line tool. You can read more about that on my ASP.NET Weblog article.
