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I am building a multilingual video site using Drupal. A key feature is interactive transcript (like http://www.3playmedia.com/services-features/plugins/interactive-transcript/)

I already have caption files (SRT format and XML format) for all videos and I plan to use lingotek (http://www.lingotek.com/drupal) to have English caption machine translated first and then leverage on community efforts to improve translation quality.

I am not very clear whether I should import caption files (SRT file, for example) as Fields or as Nodes.

SRT file is in this format:

1
00:00:15,640 --> 00:00:19,019
and 2006 just

2
00:00:19,018 --> 00:00:21,399
worse left started to

If I import SRT as Fields, then I can either:

  • Create a Field called Caption, and each instance of Caption is an entry in SRT file. There will be many Caption instances
  • Create three Fields, eg: Start Time, End Time, Caption Text. Each entry in SRT file will be converted to fill values for Start Time, End Time, and Caption Text. Those three fields will be in a field group.

If I import SRT as Nodes, then I need to

  • Create a new Content Type, add two custom Fields (Start Time and End Time).

Personally I think probably the 2nd option (imported as Node) is better because it gives more flexibility. But I also understand it comes with some cons, too.

Would you please share some comments?

Bhargav Rao
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Minghui Yu
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1 Answers1

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Neither, I think you should keep the original format intact. Maybe use nodes as a wrapper for the srt file.

The reasoning behind this is that drupal entities are not optimised for this kind of work. I'm guessing that in a length of a movie you will have a few hundred captions. Keeping those captions as fields (1st option) will result in an enormous table a few thousands rows long. And if you import the srt as a node than translating it to the database will again give you no advantage.

My suggestion is that each srt entity will have a file field with an srt file and whenever it needs process you will call for a processing function that will interpret it and act accordingly.

Eyal
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  • Thanks, Eyal. I plan to add supplementary materials (link, image, ppt, video, etc) to selected video fragments. So when visitors watch video, supplementary materials will pop up along with caption. I also plan to invite visitors to comment on each video fragment. It all requires Drupal to know how to split the entire video into many fragments (based on SRT file). – Minghui Yu Dec 09 '14 at 03:58
  • Suggestion: - Use Taxonomy instead of Nodes (they are better suited). - Create a taxonomy caption only when needed (When adding supplementary material). - Add an index field (instead of start end times). That field will be synced with the srt caption index. – Eyal Dec 09 '14 at 04:10