Anyone who has worked with me knows that I am big on video captions. “Rachel won’t stop talking about .srt files,” they say.
When you “burn” captions on videos, so that the captions are always on and are not controlled by a video player caption button, these are called open captions…drumroll please…as opposed to CLOSED captions, which is a term you’ve been hearing your whole life! Closed captions are a separate text stream that’s synced with the video, often by way of an… .srt file! My favorite file. 😂
As big on captioning as I am, I just learned today that these captions are called open captions. I’d just been saying burnt. Open captions were originally preferred over closed (like, in the early 90s) because not all user agents (TVs, web media players) supported display of embedded caption files. Therefore, burnt captions were considered more “open.”
We now know, of course, that closed captions are better always…all TVs and any legitimate video player support it, they are indexable, searchable (++SEO!), the only working option for deafblind users, and not at risk of being crunched during video compression.
This is like when I learned that soft drinks are called “soft” not because they are actually soft in any way but because they exist opposite “hard” drinks.
Sounding like I know what I’m talking about sometimes comes second.