Video Caption With Flash CS3

The captioning component FLV Playback Captioning is part of the installation package of new Adobe FLASH CS3. But this option doesn’t work  if you don’t use it with FLVPlayback component so you must use them both. Now let’s see what you need to make the caption to work. First you need to watch the video and note the text and times. Then you have to create some XML documents and finally you have to link the XML documents to the captioning component in FLASH or to insert it into FLV. Well it’s simple to use it but you have to know some basics of the FLASH CS software and to be friendly with the XML standards and specification of captioning  of W3C (World Wide Web Consortium).

OK let’s talk about time captions. In FLVPlayback components you can see all captions by using of a Timed Text XML document which is a part of TimedText folder and the file is called TimedText.xml. 

Now let’s see how to hook the Timed Text captions to FLVPlayback components.

1.     Open  a new FLASH CS3 document and check the use of ActionScript 3.0 to be enabled.

2.     Then select  Windows -> Components  and drag a copy of the FLVPlayback and FLVPlaybackCaptioning components to the work stage. Feel free to drag and drop it anywhere at the stage because it is not visible at run time.

3.     Then find the FLVPlayback component on the stage, select it and click the Parameters tab in the Property Inspector. Then double click on the Skin parameter and open the Select Skin dialog box. Select  the SkinUnderPlayCaption.swf from the Skin pop down.

4.     Next  double click the Source parameter and, when the Content Path dialog box opens, navigate to the TimedText folder and select Captions.flv. Then click OK to close the dialog box.

5.     Last  select the FLVPlaybackCaptioning components on the stage and click on the Parameters in Property Inspector. Then click once into Source parameter  and enter - captions.xml to link the captions in XML document  to the video.