About
The Kaltura player supports closed captions, translations, and audio description for both VOD and live content.
- Captions: Text versions of the dialogue and sound content.
- Translations: Text versions of the dialogue in other languages.
For details on creating and managing captions, translations, and other services, visit our Captioning & enrichment services articles.
Features
In the player, viewers can:
- Toggle between captions, translations, audio description and extended audio description. These are fully searchable as metadata.
- Use captions with screen readers through Kaltura’s accessibility player plugin (VPAT compliant).
- Search captions using the In Video Search API to jump to specific phrases in a video.
- Select a captions language (see Ordering Captions).
- Switch between audio tracks (multi-audio for VOD requires a custom transcoding flavor, handled by Kaltura Professional Services).
- Enable audio description and extended audio description (see Standard Audio Description and Extended audio description).
- Adjust caption appearance, including style, position, and alignment (see Customize how captions look in the player).
- Open a transcript when available on VOD. The Transcript widget can be added to display captions in a side window, with search and jump-to-time options.
- Use navigation to search captions text with the magnifying glass icon (see Navigation plugin).
Setup
To learn how to set the Captions default display on the player, see Set captions to display by default in the player.
To set the player's default audio language, see the Advanced settings.
User interface
If a video has extended audio description, an AD button (1) displays on the bottom bar to allow the user to enable / disable the extended audio description.
If a video has captions, a CC button (2) appears on the bottom bar to allow the user to instantly show or hide default captions.
In addition, if a video has captions, multi-audio tracks or audio description, these are added to the settings menu (3) to allow the viewer to navigate between languages and turn off features. The viewer can use the captions sub-menu within the settings menu to select different caption languages, if those are available.
The administrator can also choose whether to have captions display on the player by default when the user starts playing the video.
Caption support
The Kaltura player supports several types of captions/subtitle formats, both in-band (part of the streaming manifest itself), or out-of-band (using an external file).
The following caption types are supported:
| Caption format | Description |
|---|---|
WebVtt (.vtt) |
Most common format for online video. WebVtt captions can be embedded as part of the stream or be side-loaded as a separate file. |
SubRip Text (.srt) |
Common format for online video, containing only captions without metadata. |
SMPTE-TT |
Supports DVB subtitles, which are common in live liner streams, as well as image-based or character-based captions which are embedded in the stream. SMPTE-TT is supported by the DASH streaming format. |
Try it out
