[theora-dev] First steps towards a simple text stream format.

[Philip Jägenstedt]

On Sun, 10 Aug 2003 09:33:46 +1000
Silvia.Pfeiffer at csiro.au wrote:

> Hi Philip,

Hello.
 
> you might want to check out www.annodex.net . Annodex defines an annotation
> bitstream for ogg files, where annotations appear time-synchronously to the
> clips you are annotating (just like captions). Annodex does not do text
> formatting, but as it uses XML, html-like formatting could be incorporated.
> Annodex has multiple annotation tracks so you can do several languages in
> parallel. It also has meta tags for structured comments (so vorbis comments
> could be fitted into there). In addition it has a hyperlink concept
> incorporated where you can attach a URI to a clip. So, it goes a bit beyond
> what you are asking, but as it is simple, you might find it useful anyway.

Yes, this is a bit too specialized for my liking. I don't know if it's a
fetish or what, by I want things to be generic and reusable, so as to
not place limitations on its use. Being able to do more than you want
isn't exactly a limitation, but it discourages the use of that thing for
more generic things. Somehow, no subtitle format, no matter how complex
will be able to do everything all the people on earth want to do. For
this reason, I think it should just do as little as possible, leaving
the more complex situation for another format -- more complex but still
generic (yes, I mean SVG). I guess it's the UNIX philosophy of "do one
thing, and do it good" that's gotten to me.

Neverthless, there are some interresting ideas (like being able to
specify a timebase instead of fixing at, say 0.001 seconds as I had
thought) in annodex, and I shall read the spec closely before moving on.

Thanks for the pointer!

// Philip Jägenstedt
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