questions for designers

[Novak, Alexey]

Sorry I accidentally sent this email to everyone at idrc instead of fluid-work. My apologies if you get this email twice.


Hi there,

There are couple of questions that I would like to ask our designers.

I started working on VideoPlayer(VP) and OERC integration which eventually resulted into work related to a VP component (let's call it Amara  component for the purpose of this email) which would allow VP to pull available languages for captions from Amara.org<http://amara.org/>. This way users can integrate a VP into the page and immediately start using it with captions and transcripts out of the box.

These are the questions:

1) Currently Amara component uses a video source options to query for available captions on Amara.org<http://amara.org/> . Most likely the integrator would want to include multiple source for different video file types (Example: integration can specify .webm file to support FireFox, .mp4 to support Chrome/Safari/IE and youtube link for browsers which do not support HTML5) in order to support multiple browsers. How would the Amara component work if there are multiple sources? Which source should it use in order to pull the available language list? There are couple of potential solutions for this problem but I am not sure which one works best if any.

  *   Amara component would check every source until it finds the first which has captions on Amara.org<http://amara.org/> and only applies them. This solution introduces importance of the sequence in which sources are listed by the integrator.
  *   Amara component would check every source and construct a list of available languages using every single source. This solution could be very costly since VP would be querying every source to assemble the language list. Furthermore, which language has the priority if two sources have two different captions for the same language type?
  *   Amara component checks every source which is marked by an integrator for checking Amara for available captions. The same problem as above, which language has the priority if two marked sources have two captions for the same language type?
  *   Any other ideas


2) Language menus (menu for Captions language, menu for Transcripts language, menu for Audio Descriptions language….) are updated after a delay since Amara component uses an asynchronous call to grab the list of available captions on Amara.org<http://amara.org/>.
Should we show some kind of interface notification in the VP language menus to signify that the list of languages are not complete yet and that more languages should appear once they are got fetched from the server? What should happen in the case when user sets UIO language setting to be Spanish and after some time a VP returns Spanish as one of the available languages on Amara?
Example: UIO language settings are set to Spanish but Spanish language is not present in the VP language menus.
User changed captions to French in VP since it is the second language (s)he knows.
Amara component returned the list of available captions and Spanish is one of them.
Does VP needs to switch captions to Spanish or leave them French?


3) What happens if user switches UIO language settings to be Spanish but then one of the VPs does not have in the list? It is an open-ended question if we want to consider several preferred languages in UIO instead of just one.


Any thoughts or ideas would be welcome.

Thanks,
Alex
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